© mark mulligan, Seattle, Earth, Third Millennium CE
If every Learner on WeaponWorld
Cast off misgivings and worked to the same plan,
We could put together PeaceWorld in a single generation.
FIRST THINGS FIRST!
WORLD PEACE FIRST!
“We are now faced
with the fact that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing
as being too late. Procrastination is
still the thief of time. Life often
leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not
remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry
out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every
plea and rushes on. Over the bleached
bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic
words ‘Too late.’ There is an invisible
book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ
moves on…’ We still have a choice today:
nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to
choose between chaos and community.”
Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, 1st
ed., 1967, “The World House”, http://ww.forusa.org/nonviolence/MLK_WorldHouse.html
Caution: What follows is a pretty long book full of free ideas and inspirations that have been robbed from us. Relax; I’ve broken it down into about a hundred chapters a little less troublesome. The whole thing is still long and hard to read (my fault). That’s really too bad. I would rather have gotten multi-media specialists to adorn this endless screed with stained glass and cantatas (at least as good as the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary, set to a soundtrack just as stunning). Ah well, another project beyond my grasp in the absence of outside help… Where has it gone to hide, all this famous help?
From your favorite book, to the Bill of Rights, to the Space Shuttle Flight Manual, a text doesn’t grab the road until quite a few good people share its content. Until then, it is just another string of empty symbols and they, just another bunch of dreamers. If you seek to launch liberty, liftoff – or World Peace, for that matter – you and many more will have to study the same basic text, give it voice and act on it.
No text is perfect; that means sifting through a lot of raw ore to come across a few rough diamonds worth buffing up and showing off to your friends. Impressed, they may rally to the cause and contribute to its crafting.
I may be addressing here your reading chore, or mine of endless rewrites.
A revolutionary text is a lot like any other tool. It may seem awkward, at first, to your virgin mind, the way some new tool might fail in your untrained hands. Only repeated trial and error will make it work for you. Be patient and work hard. I assure you, this is worth it. You Learners I have waited for with such impatience; here is what you were awaiting so patiently.
Those very few of us who crave World Peace more than we fear it, need to share a specific text. This one, perhaps, or another? Learners’ pages may be nothing more than rough drafts for some better plan.
We must ponder the same topics, debate the same ideas over and over again and more of us in time—to achieve anything useful. For or against, that doesn’t matter; sharing the same ideas and vocabulary, that matters. Until then, we are just miming divergent ideas and fantasizing at cross-purpose to no constructive end.
Look around you; the world is getting sicker every day. It misses the healing balm of untold voices preaching peace in unison, and of our healing touch guided by a shared purpose.
Try not to interpret Learners with your inner voice alone; overdub instead the massive roar of millions of allied Learners. This text is powerless in their absence, no matter what ideas it intends to convey. With them, the ideals of World Peace will evolve from wishful thinking into down-to-earth reality. Once you reach my age, your grownup children will take for granted the fantastic assertions of Learners, whether or not they agree with them. Up to them, then, to come up with something better.
Wait and see. We are at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius: one of many cues. For the time being, study these pages carefully and share them with your friends, that we may best serve Peace.
Also, I’d like to remind every beloved Learner – global and domestic – that there are quite a few of us, here in America, who aren’t troglodytes and born-again Huns, despite current claims to the contrary.
If it were in my power, I would get experts to translate this text into every tongue, so that everyone could contribute to this project. If I could, I would get every government on Earth to sponsor a free translation web page that would render every major language into every native one and back again. A page you may have already paid for with your taxes, which your nation’s secret service could be using. So that everyone on Earth could engage in peaceful debate like civilized beings. But that’s another chapter.
As usual, when it comes to the human condition, Learners’ creative anarchy will have to overcome institutional sterility.
I would rather that many foreign language speakers (You!) took their favorite chapters from LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld, translated them into their mother tongue (as I have, in French and English) and uploaded them to the Web. Credit me as author (my name appears at the bottom of this page, the Title and Contact Pages, rarely if at all elsewhere in Learners) and yourself as translator. That way, your fellow citizens may contribute to this PeaceWorld project as welcome peers in the World Agora. Please do this for me, for yourself and for our common glory, but especially for them.
No one may be left behind, regardless of language skills. Fifty major language groups include 99% of the world population. I need about fifty gifted Learners, giving of themselves, to form the vanguard of this revolution.
Why wait? Start reading and translating these chapters for the sake of your compatriots! As in my case, this is the task you’ve prepared for all your life.
Please, thank you and you’re welcome, friend Learner.
I’m using the WWW to transmit this message to you; the same way Erasmus used the new printing press to transmit his. I am using you, Learner idealist; the same way Erasmus made use of every humanist on Earth to proclaim his dream. Let’s see how much we could make the earth shake, once we ‘trivial idealists’ rally.
One last thing. No need to spend a lot of time striving for literary perfection. What I ask from you is honesty, passion and haste. There will be plenty of time, later on, to arrange a perfect translation and defend it from reactionaries and their cant. Nothing but delay would detract from your glory as visionary pioneer and first benefactor of your people. Thus, upload your draft translation immediately, no matter how clumsy it may seem to you; then take your time to perfect it through many rewrites, as I am doing with the original text. There is so little time left, time is of the essence.
Tell me about your translation uploaded to the Internet, that I may note your work in my Table of Contents.
The secret to World Peace resides in the deliberate cooperation of the world’s elites and proletariats acting together as Learners, rather than their discord fostered by warmongers on both sides of every issue.
I did not write this text, nor did you seek it, to stoke the WeaponWorld Jive Drive, distract you from your Learner responsibilities or reassure you that weapons elites should make every vital decision without your say-so. That has never been sane policy. Learners would include everyone’s decision, naturally.
The secret to World Peace resides in the world’s elites and proletariats acting together as Learners, rather than their discord fostered by warmongers on both sides.
In pursuit of why, how, and what to expect of PeaceWorld,
Please refresh the pages below – I try to update them often.
My blog: Escape from WeaponWorld
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Martin Luther King quotation. Invitation to read Learners and translate some of its chapters into the reader’s mother tongue.
Summary
of Learners: World Peace
Still working on the Summary. What a bored, stressed, aversive or overworked reader might find too much to handle today, a dozen generations of meticulous scholars may pore over, harvesting shortfalls.
We are trained as children against peace. Once Learners understand that fact, we may unlock and open wide the doors to Peace World.
Table of contents (you are here.)
Includes those to each chapter. A more fractal, quantum jumpy and fuzzy logic description of Learners than these lengthy, Newtonian sentences. Also more easily translated into other languages.
I will wake again in darkness / Je veillerai tantot dans l’obscurite --- Chanson d’automne / Paul Verlaine / Autumn song --- By not loving you / En ne t’aimant point --- Ballade des pendus / François Villon / Ballad of the hanged --- The second coming / W.B. Yeats / Le second avènement --- Nobody is blocking world peace, but you / Personne ne bloque la paix au monde, sauf toi --- I have a rendez-vous with death / Alan Seeger / J’ai un rendez-vous avec la mort --- L’ame du vin / Charles Baudelaire / The soul of wine --- What questions about when? / Quelles questions sur quand? --- Blue Energy Water / L’energie bleue dans l’eau --- Go Find It / Va trouver --- Darkness, Darkness / Jesse Colin Young / Noirceur, Noirceur --- Grimpe / Climb --- Darkness, Darkness / Jesse Colin Young / Noirceur, Noirceur --- Go Find It / Va le trouver --- Global Atlantis / L’Atlantide globale --- Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold / La plage de Douvres --- What Is All This For? / Pourquoi faire, tout ça ? --- Come to me, Eureka / Viens-moi, Eureka --- I’m in hurry to get high/ J’ai hatte de me defoncer --- We are all the Grizzly Man / Nous sommes tous l’homme grizzly --- I cannot trust you if / Je ne te fais aucune confiance si --- An Irish Airman Foresees his Death / W.B. Yeats / Un aéronaute irlandais prévoit sa mort --- World Peace, Jobless Washer Woman / La paix au monde : lavandière désœuvrée --- The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower / Dylan Thomas / La force qui à travers le fusible vert dirige la fleur --- La peine que j’induis, je dois ressentir / The Pain that I Induce, I must feel --- We Win / Nous Gagnons --- Pavane pour une planète défunte / Pavane For A Dying Planet --- J’entends les oies / I Hear the Geese --- One Art / Elizabeth Bishop / Un art --- Prends sa place / Take its Place
Please provide a link from your site to mine, and email me.
We need a whole new political vocabulary. Our range of topics will be encyclopedic and our first treatment of them, insolently superficial and subject to mythic dismissal at every page turn.
Mein
Fahrt, Quoting Hitler out of Context
Hitler understood that an ideology needs a simple message that everyone can understand and agree with. It requires step-by-step development. His intent was toxic; ours could be beneficial. The mechanism remains, to use or abuse.
The Collective Superconscience
Do we share a collective superconscience? Do we pollute it with our violence? Could we flood it with Peace?
Darwinian selection for better military states. Leadership in weapon and peace contexts.
Innate human evil or ultimate good? Nature, nurture and other good things.
Pick you constellation of political metaphors: historically pure or dreaming tomorrow into reality. You choose.
Take a break. Contact me. This is hard.
Why are we in this mess?
Are we too cooperative or too competitive? Why?
Wars are not open and shut, warfare is eternal. Those who resist it best, die the fastest.
The science and craft of warfare in history and the present.
Sacrifice or celebration? Weapons religions promote sacrifice; peace religions, celebration. We should be celebrating Learners, not sacrificing victims.
What I Think of the Rapture, Man
Jesus never used the word Rapture; it is not in the Bible. Christ forbids Christians to pray in church and in public. See for yourself in Matthew 6-5. What are ‘Christian’ fundamentalists up to: disobeying His direct instruction, leading the faithful astray, turning the uncertain away in disgust and thus perverting Christianity?
What made perennial peasants and nobles revere these heretics, instead of their Catholic clergy, fully mature?
My attempt to rewrite the Cathari catechism lost during in opening phase of the Inquisition.
Identity, conflict and community. Adherents of different identity positions could become Learners. Their shared identity could shield everyone from human rights abuse.
Our constellation of political metaphors is full of weapon myths. We could replace them with peace myths.
A list of suggested does and don’ts (or at least not too often).
The Syndrome: government is bad, let’s make it slow and stupid. The cure: government is as good or bad as the nearest Mayor’s office. See to it that Mayor’s offices are better, more often than not.
The
Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
His social contract lacked the consideration (legal term) that would have triggered and guaranteed it: World Peace. Rousseau’s genius recognized the limits of communications during his day. Those faulty communications cancelled the influence of his social contract on international relations. Using technologies that he lacked, we could reduce that cyclopean wall into a puff of air.
The fatal mistake of Marx. Describing information politics without the weapon/peace antinomy would be like discussing orbital mechanics in the absence of gravity. Economics is just another sub-branch of information flow. It is infinitely renewable and exponentially profitable. It can be multiplied by millions of times, when set to chaotic and anarchic dialog mode instead of centralized and government-promoting monolog mode, much less productive. An untapped abundance resides there, that Learners can liberate.
The development of the threat formula: Body Count times (Time over Distance) squared; instead of the armchair formula that accelerates thought (see below).
Walk a mile in the boots of an average grunt.
The links between crime, warfare and governance.
Two paths that Capitalism can take and their consequences.
America’s weakness and ultimate power.
One out of ten authors survives and one of ten of his works, among best-preserved historic writings. Did you know that the Iliad and the Odyssey were actually two thirds of a trilogy?
More book burning until now. Book burning is ecumenical in history and sickeningly omnipresent.
Are fascism and modern political philosophy too similar? Why?
The institution of righteousness. We have our precedent.
Failure to heed warnings until it is too late, typical of weapon mentality.
A partial list of lies by type.
Weapon mentality is lethal by design. It cannot help itself; that is what is does best. If you want to massacre everything, you have picked the right pet. Choose another one, more docile.
SECTION II – HOW
How do we get from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld?
Peace Mentality, Weapon Mentality
Superficial growth with deep roots, explosive growth from shallow ones. Concerning deep roots and fruitful growth.
The World Elephant is run by a cockroach mind: its muscular power out of balance with its neurological awareness. It wanders around blind, breaks its limbs and starves in the produce section of a grocery store. That is our world. Graft an elephant’s brain into it and watch it dance. That dance would be our lifeline to PeaceWorld.
Education as Pathology vs. the Armchair Formula
Modern education is about triage and restriction. Learner education would honor every child with a doctorate by puberty, the way we treat prodigal musicians today. Accelerate information flow instead of rationing it. Turn the hierarchic ziggurat of education upside down, into a cornucopia of Learning: anarchic but self-filtering for quality.
The rules that regulate our communications by means of a constellation of political metaphors. Free speech and profit centers. More anarchic dialog bandwidth and less frequency of official monolog.
Information handling by peace technology.
Taichi Sakaiya wrote about perceived abundance and the objective value judgments that arise from it; he wrote about dearth and the knowledge value judgments that arise from it. Suggested peace technology applications of knowledge-value that will balance affluence and poverty, objective value and knowledge-value.
Laocracy as a direct and perpetual referendum alternative to indirect and sporadic representative democracy. A suggested architecture for the World Agora and its information politics on PeaceWorld. Sociopathocracy, rule by sociopaths (see above) over WeaponWorld.
For maximum justice.
How to list topics of passion and their adherents.
Some problems with large-scale governance.
Your picture is as valid as mine. Let’s build ours together.
On the benefits of extended travel.
Ancient Abundance & Little Green Men
Laughably unscientific speculations and outlandish hypotheses for you fireworks entertainment.
Peace technology applications of science and superstition.
A complementary replacement to his theory of evolution.
Amer-Ind as a universal travelers’ language supplemental to birth languages. On cultural ecology: its strangulation by corporate weapon culture and its appreciation on PeaceWorld.
On the fine art of verifaction: the search for the truth on both sides of a conflict. On Islam. What if the two agreed perfectly?
Gandhi’s ideas on Satyagraha, conflict resolution and non-violence―gratefully lifted from Mark Juergensmeyer’s book.
A poem on Satyagraha and verifaction.
Try not to evaluate the economics of peace technology according to the econologic of weapon mentality.
What should we expect once we reach PeaceWorld?
Could we turn the Earth into a larger, better model of Victorian England? The Earth as a squireship. Factory towns fringing Earth orbit instead of the sea. Outer space, the colonies?
Is the living voice of DNA the voice of the serpent of Eden, the devil? Or is it the Holy Spirit that Jesus left us as a Comforter, pending His return? DNA is very old and very wise; our souls are saved already. Why not tap into that titanic database to unearth answers to our worst problems? DNA in other incarnations has already survived them and turned them to advantage. Why not share them here and now in realtime?
More outlandish, pre-historic speculations for your dining and dancing pleasure.
We must have a thousand times more medics. Weapons impediments to public health, and peace technology applications to healthcare.
Alternative transportation hardware and the formal interdiction of nuclear war.
Good ecology as a constitutional right.
Another list of keywords: urban renewal, urban forestry, tectonic remediation, covered cities, elevated walkways, solar power. Grass roots surveillance of large-scale activities.
Your Rights or their Privileges?
The accord of rights on PeaceWorld.
The best means of population control is as many children and old folks as possible, healthy and well cared for—and many fewer exceptions.
“The Constitution calls for a well-regulated militia,” … Harm Forces on Peace World.
Convivencia, learning to live together. Urban design and environmental protections.
Be kind
enough to translate your favorite chapter of Learners into your own
language, please? A more or less fatuous
list of personal suggestions. How dare
I? Because my sister asked me. Make up your own!
Sustainable development through peace technology, activism, social commentary, futurism, prophecy, politics, political theory, ecology and peace, idealism, urban renewal, global management, global federation, the world vision we lack.
Litter control as a sidewalk sport. Garbage is for WeaponWorld slums, not PeaceWorld’s New Jerusalem. Recycling it should become a child’s game.
JE
VEILLERAI TANTOT DANS L’OBSCURITÉ - a
CHANSON
D’AUTOMNE – Paul Verlaine
AUTUMN SONG - b
BALLADE DES PENDUS –
François Villon
THE SECOND COMING – W.B.
Yeats
NOBODY IS BLOCKING WORLD
PEACE, BUT YOU
PERSONNE NE BLOQUE LA PAIX AU MONDE, SAUF TOI - f
I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH
DEATH – Alan Seeger
J’AI
UN RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC LA MORT - g
L’AME DU VIN – Charles Baudelaire
THE
SOUL OF WINE - h
QUELLES QUESTIONS SUR QUAND? - i
THE PARABLE OF THE YOUNG MAN
AND THE OLD – Wilfred Owen
LE PARABOLE DU JEUNE HOMME ET DU VIEUX - j
VA TROUVER – l
DARKNESS, DARKNESS - Jesse Colin Young
NOIRCEUR, NOIRCEUR - ll
GRIMPE - m
GLOBAL ATLANTIS – n
LA PLAGE DE DOUVRES - nn
À MOI, EUREKA! - p
NOUS
SOMMES TOUS L’HOMME GRIZZLY - r
JE NE PUIS TE FAIRE CONFIANCE - s
AN
IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH – W. Yeats
UN AERONAUTE IRELANDIS PREVOIT SA MORT - t
WORLD PEACE,
JOBLESS WASHER WOMAN
LA PAIX AU MONDE : LAVANDIERE DESOEUVREE – u
THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES
THE FLOWER – Dylan Thomas
LA FORCE QUI DEPUIS LE FUSIBLE VERT DIRIGE LA FLEUR - v
LA
PEINE QUE J’INDUIS, JE DOIS RESSENTIR
THE
PAIN THAT I INDUCE, I MUST FEEL – w
NOUS
GAGNONS – x
PAVANE
POUR UNE PLANÈTE DEFUNTE
UN ART
- z
ODE
À LA VERITE ET A LA NON-VIOLENCE
THE MENTALITY AND TECHNOLOGIES OF PEACE
MENTALITES ET TECHNOLOGIES PAISIBLES
À
Maman, inspiratrice d’élégante simplicité,
Et à Dad, feu chevalier sans peur et sans reproche …
To our libraries and their epic quest to appease The Hunger.
May those brave soup kitchens become banquet halls of Learning:
World Agora porticos to PeaceWorld.
I submit this work to the verdict of Ganesh.
The quest for Learners has led me to a Tartar steppe of blazing solitude with no end in sight. My awful trip has taken me from one oasis of fellowship to the next, somewhere beyond the horizon. I tarried at each way station, refreshed by a few friends’ tenders of confidence and support. Then I resumed my dismal trek.
In The Language Instinct, Peter Pinker says he never met anyone indifferent to his topic of passion. I cannot admit as much. Active indifference begot passive aggression the moment I interrupted routine patter with Learners’ discontent.
I have a genius for raising ire. Sexual harassment would not have triggered such bitter confrontations. My wife, Linda, suggested it was not what I said that bought me trouble, but how I said it. Perhaps. This work would never have seen the light of day without the heartfelt support – if at times bemused – of my beloved manuscript widow.
I’m so proud of my family and friends: Learner role models all. Many others furthered this work in their own way, even if unknowingly.
I owe special thanks to the foreign volunteers and kibbutznikim (Israeli collective farmers) at Kibbutzim Evron and Dorot. And to our Arab and Palestinian hosts as well, whose Muslim birthright is Peace.
To our distant ancestors from those ancient domains: Hominids, Pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all those in between: the ultimate survivors of God’s wrath.
The Americas – North, South and Central – form a triad jewel. Similarly, Israel and its neighbors form an antique necklace of infinite promise – unrealized, so far – that stretches and flows miraculously beyond its borders, in intimate contact with other nuclei of ancient civilization. Come ye together, every wise Learner, regardless of provenance and language! Every wise one singing in harmony of peace: Learners assembled on PeaceWorld…
I have benefited from many blessings: Plutarch’s passion and Voltaire’s star-field enlightenment; Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, the Dupuy Brothers’ Encyclopedia of Military History, Carroll Quigley’s Weapon Systems & Political Stability, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War and Peace.
I used to draw sanity supplements from The Nation magazine. Eventually, I had to give it up, from its galling refusal to support my project or any other of significant social transformation, for that matter. Like other American “liberals,” its editors whine endlessly about things they refuse to change. They and their peers in The Progressive, Dissent, Z, Harpers, Utne Reader and other Anglo-Saxon periodicals that dare call themselves Leftist or Progressive, despite their stuffy, middle-of-the-road fainéantise (fainaionteez, “best do nothing” attitude). The worse things get, the more tragedies and scandals they have to whine about in print and the greater the number of horrified subscribers paying for their whining. Yay! If things improved tremendously, their kind of hands-off criticism would go out of business. In the long run, meddlesome meliorists and atomistic progressives combine to approve the worst wreckage.
There are only two political parties in America: Conservative and Reactionary. Democrats who haven’t had a good idea in six decades or accepted anyone else’s in half that time, and Republicans who never met a bad idea they didn’t love. Bad ideas that Democrats never manage to resist, as if by black magic, or hidden desire (well-funded) to see the Republicans succeed with their anonymous assistance. With us trapped between these two bands of brigands. Take your pick.
The editorial formula of The Nation (if there is one, it is carefully concealed) implies perpetual surrender of the initiative to the reactionaries. Surrender, period. America’s political quagmire confirms my conclusion. So-called Progressives are more responsible for the sewer backflow of American politics, than the reactionaries themselves. We could easily dismiss stupid reactionaries; but the subtle monopoly and sabotage of progressive ideals by “liberals” is a paralytic of fearsome potency.
With friends like those, who needs enemies?
Many people and publications have confirmed my conclusions, even if they ignored the subtext of their words, intentions and deeds.
Nature has revealed heart-rending wonders to me. Each new revelation confirmed our entitlement to peace, abundance and justice -- to the God of Love’s benevolence, the Comforter Jesus promised us.
I am very grateful to Govind Naidu, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Into his lap the mails fluttered my unsolicited little manuscript. His thought-provoking reply galvanized this odd quest of mine. Apart from a few ephemeral phone calls, I was satisfied with his unique inspiration.
I owe undying thanks to Ted Fagin: affable neighbor, gentleman gambler, bibliophile, anarchist and Dog Soldier: the mentor I prayed for and now grieve. Cheerily, he set aside his terminal affliction and grave misgivings about the content of this book, to mentor me English. Thanks also to sister Leslie who lovingly landscaped the prose whose civil engineering Ted undertook, to Karen for beckoning me beyond my comfort zone, and to Jill for her spirit of Fairness.
Best friends Doug Dean and Paul Lackman plowed through rough drafts of this text, and offered many more suggestions than my few attributions suggest—Doug, from first drafts until his regretted demise (so painfully long ago), and Paul since.
Thanks also to countless thugs, hooligans, hypocrites and fascists out there (flaming, blaming or crypto-), for whom:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Who cares whether they wore battledress or class-A uniforms, TV pancake makeup or the ashes of mourning, institutional silks or the rags of dissent? Everyone is a naked mortal underneath. Their arrogant impunity raised low rancor to new heights of moral rankness. Without the awful fecundity of their malice, I’d never have found enough outrage to manhandle this project.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the kind souls at the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Seattle, with whom I’ve worked for so many years. And earlier, to the dedicated people at the Damage Assessment Branch, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also in Seattle. They would have been better served by someone less distracted, but found a way to tolerate my Learner daydreams.
Thanks to Alta Vista Bablefish online translation service, I got a free means to turn an impossible dream, translating Learners into French, into an entertaining if challenging impracticality. My dozen or so Keyword pages, translated in as many languages, are also its result. Likewise, to Google Translation, for Arab, Farsi and Indonesian versions. In addition, I must thank Microsoft, Inc., and its Bowne Global Service auxiliary, for useful if sometimes cantankerous online translation services, in their Word 2000 package. Also, http://www.wordreference.com/fr/index.htm, where I found French translations I was too stupid to do myself; and http://www.touchon.net/annuaire-site-plans-dictionnaires.php for synonyms in French, likewise.
I’ll never get over the fact that I never found free translation services of high quality in the major South Asian language groups or any from Africa. Even in those translated, the quality has been very rough at best. We are truly unimpressive when it comes to gathering together in peace. Much work remains to be done.
Learners speaks ill of entrepreneurial software companies. Software delivery should be a public utility renowned for its consistency, free service and ease of use. In the meantime, Mr. Bill Gates, thank you for having eased my burden.
And to Jean Bacon and son, whose book and translation of Les Saigneurs de la Guerre (The Greater Glory) lit my way through the skull-lined labyrinth of WeaponWorld. To all those in my Bibliography, who set stepping stones across the sucking gore quagmire of WeaponWorld, to PeaceWorld’s shaded grove.
To the lovely Esmeralda Arana (whom I never met), who kicked my butt at just the right moment, if not in a direction she could predict.
I owe special thanks to Google. Its search spiders crawled every page of my work, keyword indexed the whole thing and sent me thousands of readers for free. Many fewer per day since I moved Learners to another URL, but thanks anyhow. Bad move; I could have kicked myself for moving it. Other search engines and webmaster links have sent me additional readers (especially Yahoo and MSN). Thanks to all of you, without whom this samizdat would have been known by none but me.
Thank you, www.freeservers.com, for hosting my site for so many years at low cost and tremendous levels of service. And to arvixe.com, now.
Hardly any ideas proposed here are mine alone. Most Learner prescriptions unfold as part of the organic Tao, as arrogant reaction collapses under its own contradictions.
Mine all errors contained herein. Please address your comments to me. I welcome your corrections and thank you in advance for them. My feeble wit is inadequate for this task; that’s obvious. It may suffice the combined awareness of this world’s Learners gathered in the Agora of PeaceWorld; that is my hope.
Thanks also to the poets, above.
In my readings on government, I came across political theoreticians who wanted to “fix everything” and almost always failed. Why?
If you were an honest mechanic confronted by a machine that had broken in the same way for thousands of years, the first question you would have to ask would not be “How do I fix this?” After all, that has been what a thousand prior mechanics asked and answered to the best of their ability, all for nothing. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here trying to fix it for the thousandth time; this problem would already be solved.
No, the questions to ask first must be:
· Why did the machine break?
· How did it break?
· Who broke it?
For example: if it broke because forces were applied to it, during the normal course of operation, beyond its ability to endure; then no matter how many parts you replace; the machine will break again, either where it broke before or at another weak joint. If it broke because those who should have tended it, abused it instead; again, it will not matter what parts you replace. If because it was used for purposes other than those intended; again, no matter.
If you could answer those three questions accurately, you might find a new, unforeseen fix that would last; if not, never. You would have to answer them to your complete satisfaction before you could answer the last one: “How do I fix this?”
Despite the thousand-year babble of reductionist meliorists (like Machiavelli, Marx and your neighborhood progressive), around the theme of “How to fix” government; Learners seeks to ask and answer these three primary questions – deliberately and first off – in the hope that its readers may follow it’s example and do a better job. Thereafter, we may “fix” our governance, once and for all.
I sent away for a free copy of the Bible in French on the Internet (www.bibles.ch). It must be an ample source of style and inspiration for cultures that adopt it, the way the Koran (Qran) would be for Muslim cultures, and the Vedas for Hindus. Never having read the Bible in French, (nor the Qran in what I’m told is the purest Arabic, nor, alas, the life of Buddha in Pali, nor the Gita in Sanskrit, nor …), it seemed that my rusty French might benefit. Even though I must admit that I’ve never found a version of the Bible in French as beautifully written as the King James version in English.
As long as we understand how much less we know than what we don’t know, and as long as we can catch a whiff of garlic cooking (per J.G. Ballard), everything will be alright.
You will find my modest summary of the Koran at the end of Learners’ chapter on Satyagraha—a fitting and timely blend of the best of religious creeds, by my lights. God is God; the many different names we use don’t matter.
My request earned me this answer.
“What did you intend to write???”
I replied something like this.
It’s not easy to weave a welcome mat for Learners: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld. So many ideas in so few words!
I foresee a new world soon to be provided with:
· one duly elected World Mayor’s Office with its enormous grass roots Administrative Council also duly elected, (note my italics: no Big Brothers need apply. It will be our public responsibility and private pleasure to replace them with worthy tribal leaders);
· one vigilant and humane Judiciary, controlled from beginning to end by randomly selected juries; and
· one well-run, superbly professional Police Force: the best warriors on Earth, hand-picked to guarantee peace.
All by themselves, they would govern this whole planet, the way we run our best cities.
Nowadays, this planet resembles Mogadishu on a bad day:
· two hundred cruel, ego-freak gang lords,
· two hundred councils of senile elders bickering like spoiled children, and
· two hundred street corners, each with its gang of hoodlums led by decrepit murderers, playing bloody War with AK-47s, M-16s and worse.
Nowadays, the West (America, Europe, Japan...) is like Embassy Row in Mogadishu: occupying the least damaged, richest, most heavily armed neighborhoods of a city in ruins. I don’t know the layout of Mogadishu, so I might be wrong about its “best” neighborhood. My illustration stands.
Me, I’m a cheap stay-at-home and chicken to boot (thus no sainthood claimed here!). Learners’ sole intent is to instigate a more livable world that this author (and everyone else) might reincarnate into. There is no way to predict the world’s evolution in one’s absence; but PeaceWorld seems to be the obvious way to go.
From sheer selfishness, I’d rather live quietly in Seattle, Paris or Geneva (name your favorite city) – even as a poor man – than attempt some desperate survival as a millionaire in Mogadishu or Grozny. Whether my planet or hometown, the children and I would be better off growing up in Geneva, than dodging bullets down some Mogadishu lane. That seems undeniable to me.
I could care less about those sleek fat cats who swagger down Embassy Row. Gangsters in sharp-dressed suits, who cut down and starve children by the million, then turn their back on them. They make me sick. Categorically worthless, like the old regime rulers of East Germany. Better leaders, brilliant ones, are out there; we have merely to identify and empower them honestly. Also diagnose and forbid the least desirable.
Simply put, I intend to transform this world, from Planet Mogadishu into Planet Geneva. To get away with it, I will need your cooperation and that of millions more Learners (about seven million, actually: one in a thousand people on Earth, that ought to do the trick. Of course, the more the merrier!).
Imagine the prodigies that generations of better-raised children could achieve! All the streets would sparkle with cleanliness and safety; all the parks, well-tended and inviting; all the artwork, ah, the artwork! And the scientific discoveries!
Mogadishu could become what it always intended to be: a local capital of commerce, piety and Learning; a tropical garden famous for its imperial parks and its thriving, cosmopolitan port; an inviting tourist attraction and center of abundance and wisdom—where the call to prayer would never again be interrupted by the disgrace of gunfire.
And the West? Embassy Row of Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day? It would become the same district on Planet Geneva – just super-deluxe. The rising tide would lift all the boats at once, yachts and dinghies alike.
Yet Mencius, my favorite Chinese philosopher among those known, taught that it would be wiser to seek Humanity and Duty than a simple profit that may turn destructive. Humanity, Duty and Learning: those would secure a more dependable abundance.
After all, what are our incentives today? Should we profit from WeaponWorld by perfecting it? Criminal expediency. Could PeaceWorld jeopardize our income without additional return, or could it be too difficult and dangerous? Cruel and gutless denial. Could it be that world peace will not arise until humanity 2.0 emerges, as perfectly suited for it as our version is not? Circular reasoning to dodge personal responsibility. Review our common motives here, without mercy, the way a panhandler might sort and count his fistful of change in a drizzly twilight.
Of course, we’re going to need these other things, too:
· A brace of peace religions that embrace each other passionately. Are you some religious fanatic preaching exclusion and brutality in the name of God? You’re fired!
· A World Militia on the Swiss plan, that allowed each of us to defend our home, hometown and home planet against any Aggressor. It would stop armed crime and organized aggression in every community that signed up for it.
· A 1-800-my-rights telephone number, direct to the World Court. Through it, every hate crime and act of tyranny would be investigated, and every war criminal, arrested at the source and early. Especially if some local militia started acting like a loose cannon.
· A World Agora of information politics and Learning, operating upward from the grass roots, a hundred thousand times more delicate and responsive than the lashup we are used to, well-coordinated by computer and as reliable as municipal water.
· At least one advanced degree for each child by puberty, the way we honor musical prodigies today. All children would be prodigies in at least one topic of their choosing, provided we encouraged the full range of their interests and never quashed them.
· Child rearing would become a sacred obligation. So would the ritual purification of water by filtering it through biomass, or some other “miraculous” technology. There’d be many more, with so many Learners pursuing their topic of passion in the World Agora…
· A guaranteed public health service, with enough food, clothing, shelter and care for everyone. Simply because. As I say further on, a practical charity. We’d be sharing the wealth of Geneva, here, and not the penury of Mogadishu―both multiplied to planetary scale. Enough to satisfy everyone's needs, with a thousandfold left over.
· Free storefront mediation and arbitration services, faith-based or secular, for any pair holding a grudge or dispute. No civil dispute would go before a jury until it had been adjudged in this manner.
· Climax biome restoration in every available habitat; and
· Space exploration in earnest.
You know, all those things we make mighty noises about, yet carefully sabotage in favor of our weapon technologies? Please note: “OUR weapon technologies, OUR responsibility”―no one else’s. If we agreed to play this game honestly, with all our might and that of God, it could turn out better than the fatal one we practice today, blaming others for the outcome of our sins.
In so doing, we lead a life of misery: stripped of civility, charity, true faith, serious education, useful infrastructure, high art, climax biome, good taste and dependable security. Indeed, we’ve stripped our conscience bare—both as individuals and communities. We are stripping the planet bare when we could be gardening Eden.
It’s time we grew back a new conscience and a healthier one.
The worst problem? Our culture honors weapon mentality more than that of peace. Most of our social habits should honor peace, instead of merely rehearsing what it’s gonna take to survive another bad day on Planet Mogadishu. If we rendered full honor to peace, it would be better for us in so many ways we refuse to admit! We are frightened to death of peace.
Me, I’m eager to launch the project of world peace we fear most.
We submit more or less consciously to this mass-induced if disgraceful stupidity, because our societies evolved through Darwinian selection, to fear peace as much as cholera. Both are lethal to primitive cultures and both are banned by them.
Our culture trains us, from infancy under fulltime hypnosis, to shun peace and holy spirit as much as shit and piss. Social collectives and lone philosophers who chose not to train their children in this manner – who sought honest peace, true sainthood and real merit instead – got their throats cut by more militant communities, both abroad and at home.
We are the worst weapon demons, and our societies, the deadliest weapon technologies, that five (?) thousand years of Darwinian selection could produce. Do you recall the Orcs in Tolkien’s fantasy? Well, the real-world Orcs, that’s us: so-called lovers of peace who never manage to set it up.
Our modern culture is only good at optimizing the following Threat Formula:
body count x (distance/time)2
Nuclear, biological and perhaps meteorological omnicide, that’s our ultimate cultural achievement and manifest destiny if we don’t transform ourselves on every scale: social, personal and spiritual. Otherwise, that’s all we’re good at and all we’re destined to accomplish.
Humanity = 0, Omnicide = -1.
What a sorry score for such a carefully tended, wisely hardened, perfectly nursed species. We are perched on a blue-green planet that’s good for us in every way (though probably not our planet of origin, given that our biological cycle was never comfortably 24 hours long), under a vast black firmament studded with diamond solitaires veiling much more abundance.
Come on, Learners! We can do better than that!
For the first time in history, we have all the tools we need for World Peace: global communications, mutual recognition and universal thirst for peace. For the first time, humanity (even if it is not yet willing) could recognize the Other as a worthy equal. All of us could start from the same page. Up ‘til now, we lacked those vital tools in common. All we require, at this point, is consensus, will, faith and guts. Have we got enough?
Have we had enough?
Note, at the top of my list, new peace religions. I believe that standard Christianity is weapon-based and thus defective as a peace religion. The same applies to our other weapon religions; each requires a better role model to become truly peaceful. I ask you: what better role model than Christ?
Jesus often noted his disciples’ inability (or unwillingness) to understand. Our Christian faiths rely on the words of Apostle Paul, John of Revelation and St. Augustine and his Confessions. Somehow, the direct word of Jesus is lost in the background, decorative but overruled. We heed the words of men, not the Word of God. That which all of us should adore in pure faith, almost no one can stomach, so thoroughly has it been corrupted. Learners should compensate for this obvious want of faith
Jesus’ instructions were deliberately corrupted during the Roman persecution, the Nicene Council and the extermination of the Cathars. The Nicene Council erased every reference to reincarnation in the Bible. A permanent putsch of weapon reactionaries took over every creed calling itself Christian, in addition to other surviving ones. This happened for the same stupid, inevitable reasons listed above.
I believe that Jesus taught us to live well and die one last time as clueless meat puppets. Seek to be reborn in Him, literally. Reincarnate into His Perfect Life and live it out. Learn from it exactly what was needed to be saved. Suffer a second death by taking up His Cross, and go directly to Heaven with Him, (though His Mercy might spare us this last Agony).
Go read His words and see for yourself.
Otherwise, we condemn ourselves to an endless series of purposeless reincarnations, circular abstractions, insignificant rituals, empty sins and futile deaths—apart from the one He taught us, pending our compliance with His clear and simple instruction.
Inventory the content of your current life and see for yourself.
All religions would be equally valid – Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Vedic, Atheist, Deist, Pagan or other – if they allowed us a better life and didn’t get too upset if we opted to commit our souls, after dying, into the life of Jesus Christ, with a conscience somewhat less flayed by remorse. After this death, we would be perfectly free to choose Him and His path to Heaven, for the first time in our many lives.
I challenge you to find such a miraculous freedom to choose, perfect and divine, under any other circumstance. Certainly not among the officious and enslaving prescriptions of mere ape-men stuck on WeaponWorld: “Do me this, do me that, or be damned. By the way, allow us to snuff you and your benighted progeny unless you consent to kill them over there and theirs.”
Every weapon preacher of cowardly lies, brutality, exclusion, compulsion, betrayal and damnation by our infinite Loving God—that creature just refines suicidal weapon mentality devoid of faith, love and God. May God forgive him and may I find some way to ape God's infinite mercy.
Instead, we could have eternal temples of peace. Surely our Lord has enough mercy for every soul, with more to spare. I seek this apocatastasis, this universalism. The saints required to establish it are underemployed all around us.
With no such faith – no real hope – no valid government – no true peace.
Know this, then. All the souls can save themselves: yours, mine, some latter-day Hitler’s, anyone’s. Thus toughened and fearless of anything, we must do our duty; thus armored, create Peace on Earth.
This summary will bother many people, especially those too well trained as children to fear World Peace and block it as adults. It will infuriate many more who expect their warmonger rubbish to be endorsed without opposition. It will bruise the stout egos of those who declare themselves eager for peace—just as soon as everyone has reached their dizzying height of puritanical pacifism. It will confound many pet pupils who have memorized their lessons repudiating peace, and who repeat them today like parrots.
This text is revolutionary and at odds with orthodoxy; as am I. According to Learners, the most patriotic and admirable nationalist is not much more than a jumped-up Crip or Blood who claims gangland supremacy by flashing his idiot gang signs. The devoted pacifist who claims moral superiority over the average guy, will achieve no better result than he (since he is lying to himself—at least the average warmonger is an honest monster). Learners should expect fierce opposition from every philosophical quarter.
To achieve peace, we must understand how much we fear it, how much our institutions are averse to it and how completely our current thoughts and actions thwart it. Whether we call ourselves warriors or lovers of peace; whether we’re young or old, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, pious or not; whether our institutions appear benign and sacred to us, or just mediocre or even infernal. Every institution, every down-home cliché, every cultural checkpoint will have to be taken by frontal assault and cleared hand-to-hand in this intellectual Stalingrad; no-one and nothing will be spared.
What will PeaceWorld look like, once the smoke clears? It will delight our Loving God, who will bless it with miracles of approbation; unlike WeaponWorld despised by God, who lets it survive through infinite forbearance for our unforgivable sins. We would become true servants of God: athirst for, drunk with and slaked by the peace of God; wisely caring for every child; regrowing Eden and leaping for the stars. Justice. Compassion. Peace. You could leave your door unlocked in perfect safety.
Think about that.
What if we stopped fearing peace? What if we understood it, instead? Taught it to the children in pure truth, to revere peace and uphold it forever, on our honor, with all our might?
Once Learners rally, the heavens themselves will come to our aid.
This is a summary of Learners.
Out of all humanity, approximately three percent of men and one percent of women are sociopaths. One percent of humanity consists of psychopaths.
According to the therapists’ preference, those suffering from psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder and malignant narcissism, are interchangeable. Psychopaths tend to be anarchistic lone wolves, often lethal and delusional; whereas sociopaths are otherwise sane people who tend to join a subculture that promotes their vicious selfishness (like organized crime, prison, politics and the military).
Four or more percent of corporate chiefs are psychopaths, and who knows what percentage of politicians and the military? What would be the proportion of preachers, more intent on their meticulous textual fundamentalism than more natural – and from their point of view, satanic – dictates of moral conscience?
The same proportions reside inside and outside of prison, even though psycho/sociopathic convicts are guilty of almost all the violent crimes being punished. Most other convicts are locked up for victimless or one-time crimes, by a clique of psycho/sociopathic cops, court officers, legislators and their cronies.
Is there a parallel between the fact that 96% of the universe is made up of “dark matter and energy” whereas only four percent is visible matter; and 96% of mankind is conscience-driven, whereas four percent is not?
Such people can tell right from wrong in their behavior, but derive no unpleasant feelings when they commit the latter. They have no conscience, no shame and no love for anyone. They do not know what those feelings are, and look down on those bound by conscience. The truth is a matter of convenience for them, to be biased to their advantage. Especially the truth about themselves.
Many of them are charming and debonair when so inclined, manipulative and vicious when they can get away with it. They can “read” like a book the body language and facial expressions of the conscience-driven. They can fake emotions, seek pity and affection they never feel for others, and seduce their victims before they exploit, insult or injure them on purpose. They use people and discard them, the way you would use a Kleenex and throw it away.
They can commit sins without guilt, that we would find inconceivable during commission and very painful to live with, after. They get away with many evils because those around them cannot imagine such complex, belligerent and risky undertakings for such trivial reasons (like boredom, idle greed, one-upmanship or jealousy of those with superior talents).
Since their brains are not preoccupied by the infinite subconscious calculations of moral conscience and love (a little like those needed to stay upright on a bicycle, but a lot more complicated), they are burdened with a semi-permanent sense of drudgery and boredom they can only relieve by serial risky behaviors and elaborate manipulations (torture, humiliation and betrayal) of their conscientious inferiors.
They usually wind up in old age alone, broke and shunned by everyone, their family included. Many are slain or socially crushed by the powerful protector of one of their victims, or by numerous avengers. Very few die in bed surrounded by people who love them. They are pitiable, if quite dangerous, moral amputees.
The craft of government consists in keeping psycho/sociopaths in check (that is, moderately well off for doing as little damage as possible) for as long as possible. The tragedy of government is that they will take over the highest levels of government, sooner or later, as well as several ranks underneath, and ruin everything more or less for no good reason.
Recall that their principle motive is the relief of their boredom through chaos.
From a peace mentality point of view, good government is peaceful, fair, generous and permissive. You may do pretty much what you please, and not be interfered with by the government, except under special circumstances and with elaborate restraints.
Sociopaths thrive under such minimal constraints, and gradually assume all the powers of wealth and political promotion. They will recruit their sociopath peers as employees in organizations either dysfunctional or openly criminal. Eventually, they will take over everything and eject the conscience-driven from every position of responsibility; their self-serving abuse will rot out the rest of society.
The cumulative resentment of the vast majority of the conscience-driven will provoke bloody revolution. Following a bloodbath at the hands of elite sociopaths, the conscientious will discover the military advantage of a chain of command directed by sociopaths, will adopt it and thus fatally compromise the ideals that drew them to revolt.
After a series of psycho/sociopath-led oscillations of revolution and counter-revolution (this chaos their idea of paradise, allowing the greatest scope for their evil), the slate will be wiped clean, most of the small minority of sociopath leaders will be exterminated, and so many additional casualties will be induced, that exhausted and disgusted conscience-driven survivors will take up once again the temporary craft of government. They will reward surviving psycho/sociopaths at minimal expense to do the least damage – and so on.
Given this sociopathocracy noted in Learners, if your conscience motivates you to seek good and reduce evil; no matter what race, ethnicity, country, religion, ideology or organization you belong to or reject: half your worst enemies will belong to your side and half of your friends, to the other side. The only real segregation is between those driven by conscience and those without. The “side” they belong to is irrelevant.
Be warned and pick you side carefully.
There are dependable psychological tests to identify them. Mostly, their brains react to emotional problems the way most people’s (who have no problem with emotional situations) react to an algebra problem. The same brain volumes light up.
The easiest way to identify them is as schoolyard bullies and animal torturers during their naïf youth, and as perfect innocents and shameless pity seekers when caught for serial adult misdeeds.
They are never wrong. It is always someone else’s fault, including their victims’ who deserve to be abused.
Their routine speech is that of weapon government, regardless of its provenance.
There is no cure for their disease, chemical or psychoanalytical (except, perhaps eventually, for genetic surgery). They do not wish to be cured. They consider themselves superior, and the conscience-driven, inferior.
After advanced group therapy sessions deliberately targeting their affliction, they emerged with better techniques to simulate emotions they did not feel, thus duping their future victims with greater ease.
Track them down, identify them and exclude them from positions of authority, high and low. A 1-800 telephone number should be dedicated to their victims. They should be able to drop a dime on any sociopath who torments them. Investigators would then bring the suspected sociopath in for testing, the results of which would confirm or deny their need to be restricted from positions of responsibility and authority.
Above all, never allow them to assume control of the hunt for sociopaths. If given the slightest chance, they will exceed all the evils of the Inquisition (another sociopath Paradise), hunting down the innocent and laughing about it.
On the other hand, they should be stroked and cozened once identified during childhood, and generously subsidized throughout their lifetime (thus neutralizing a great chunk of the merely lazy ones, shameless parasites, but otherwise harmless); and provided constructive, risk-taking outlets for their overwhelming boredom (demining and outer space exploration, for example) and otherwise peacefully neutralized in every way possible.
The last thing we would wish for: that they become antagonized against the rest of humanity, or scared for their life or liberty. No other army would be more lethal, no insurrection more destructive, no terrorist group more alarming than that of psycho/sociopaths reunited (often, they are anarchistic individualists, and their organizations dysfunctional―see civilian Nazis) because rejected by rest of us.
Their primary social utility is in war, when they find the most frightful atrocity easy, then move on to the next. Unimpeded by moral conscience, they are more technically competent at killing and more imaginative with it. Organized massacre is their county fair. They suffer no pangs of conscience from the grim chore of killing the enemy, not even from the increase of casualties on their own side to get that job done.
Sociopaths commit the first atrocities in war and then take off for the next ones, anonymous, invisible and unpunished. Meanwhile, the remaining conscientious people in uniform (or peaceful villagers left behind) will be punished in revenge.
If those sociopaths are officious enough, normals will obey their insane orders and commit crimes unthinkable under other circumstances. This is how dirty war propagates on both sides.
Fear them like the devil. They and those under their control are responsible for most of the evil on Earth. In their absence, utopia would be just beyond our reach.
Of course, rich and powerful sociopaths have made a special effort to bad-mouth utopia in every media they could seize control of, as well as insult idealists and pacifists so methodically that they have been turned into pariahs in popular culture.
We have repeated their vicious lies to each other, like brainwashed idiots.
Beware!
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: the Ruthless versus the Rest of Us, Broadway Books, USA, 2005.
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, The Guildford Press, New York, 1999.
http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm
http://www.alienview.net/conspire.html
“… Citizens seeking to introduce changes in
the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought
to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the
difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to
attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a
people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on
the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill
Thomson, Trans., Kegan, Trench & Co., London, 1883, p. 376.
I’ve spent some thirty years, now, waiting for a worthy patron to discover Learners, publish it in many languages and make our fortune; otherwise, that I might vanish quietly from this world, without having to bother with the upshot of my intervention.
How amazingly lily-livered and chicken-brained well-connected people turned out to be, how many imaginary perils and empty distractions they’ve given priority to, and how well insulated from important but unforeseen matters by an army of myopic gatekeepers! My work has been ignored by all of them. Either they don’t give a damn or they deliberately worsen an already bad situation, as long as their bank balance fattens…
Here I am, still working alone after all these years; my oft rewritten and rejected samizdat self-published on the World Wide Web and treacherously ejected from it, only to arise from the ashes of denial. After decades of intellectual house arrest, forced to witness so-called activists and progressives congratulate themselves that reactionary backlash hasn’t got too much of an erection during their watch (even though it has), and for having dodged the grim chore of studying Learners. Forced to witness churlish warmongers earn big bucks and public acclaim by publishing reams of best-selling martial pomp, and every government trip over itself to fulfill their least stipulation, while no one dares call them on their kamikaze swan song! I’ve grown weary and gray from this universal dismissal. How much better the world could be, without so much avoidable misery!
As I review this text, its cosmic presumption stuns me. No special privilege entitles me to claim your time and attention; no lofty reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly complacency or literary merit. When I find decent work, I’m just another clerk and a distracted one at that. Nonetheless, I must claim your careful consideration here. This may be the most important text you read; that’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve long dreamt of escaping from this madhouse and repatriating into Grace – somewhere out there, beyond the white light – yet there’s so much love and beauty here. I’ve stayed up late nights, reviewing the same botched political experiments and muttering, “At least one of these ought to have worked out to spec!”
I still dare hope. Learners are a Nation among nations, a state of being within the State. In our own quiet way, once properly inspired, we will command enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners find each other in the dark; realize how numerous we are and the commanding position we hold over the world; once we rally to these ideas, we will be unstoppable and destined for glory—no matter how wretched and powerless human isolates may be with their petty pecking orders.
Aghast, I understood King Ashoka’s torment. Standing back-to-back in this carnage of our own making, we watched helplessly as millipede columns of refugees in tears crawled from the smoking wreckage of every horizon. Neither of us could escape our complicity with this disgrace, nor could we stand by, idle and indifferent. We had to do something: lunge for the fat brass ring dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to reduce the atrocity of the human condition.
This text isn’t incised in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and pro alike, should chew over each one of its assumptions. Their debate may conjure a brilliant Learner Commonwealth. Our new mantra should be “What if the sky were the limit?”
Every cubic yard of earth, air, water and vacuum contains all the energy in the Universe (minus 1?). We must become clever enough to reach into this cosmic fire and warm our hands, yet not burn our fingertips or the world. Otherwise we’re just stumble-bums, parched and starving in a desert, while untold abundance lies quietly locked away below our feet.
We are sitting down together – you and I and everyone – to share a giant super-deluxe pizza. It stretches out to the horizon, and beyond that to infinity. It is covered with good things to eat. It has mounds of perfect vegetables, creamy cheese, aromatic spices and deli delicacies: all the toppings of the world’s finest pizza. It’s got college degrees, fair housing and low infant mortality; enough abundance, justice and serenity for everyone; anything anyone could ask for, and more of it than anyone could imagine, much less find use for.
Too bad we only look down a one-degree slice of this pie, the sorriest of slices, saturated with want, fear and pain. Stripped bare, burned to the third degree and unbelievably unappetizing; it’s been combed over at sword-point for ages. Across it, starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels and refugee dumps: poster children of our failure and guilt. We can’t distinguish anything any longer but this WeaponWorld of ours: the napalm-blackened crust of a burnt-out world. Starving for something better, we scramble after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion.
The infinite leftover, heaping with untouched goodies? It is beyond sight, as far as we’re concerned. We’ve walled off the other 359 degrees of this cosmic pizza, blinkered as we have been by long-revered cultural conventions. Our culture blinkers us at birth, and more and more severely as we age. It has screened us from PeaceWorld and focused our attention on WeaponWorld. As a result, we have dismissed this abundance as mere idealism, myth, dream, fantasy, utopia and science fiction.
Learners will polarize those blinkers and reveal the whole pie to everyone. This festive bounty is certainly there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. We have but to clear our vision, roll up our sleeves, get to work and make it happen. Then it will be harvest season, and most people too busy gathering and sharing this incredible abundance, to cause further harm.
Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, as I began testing the shaky legs of my new-foaled opinions, my father challenged me thus: “It’s easy to condemn institutions,” this charming Bayard told me. I’ll always remember him as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche: a fearless and blameless knight.
That’s a tricky combination, come to think of it. Harm would be easy to inflict by those gifted with some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of war!” Only slightly more difficult to do good from fear of harmful consequences. The truest goal would be to do nothing but good, fearlessly. My valiant father strove after that for his entire lifetime, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the term. No lesser deed is worthy.
So you think yourself fearless? Fine. Do good without counting the cost, and prove it to us. A little trick you must play inside your head. Can you do it?
The above paragraph may be the most important one for sociopaths who recognize their predicament, as well as for their friends who see it in them. I suggest they reread it carefully. It might relieve their ailment and would definitely pave the swiftest road to PeaceWorld.
“Condemn institutions? Don’t bother,” this mild cavalryman told me, “unless you can come up with better alternatives.”
I've knocked myself out, since, trying to conjure up those famous alternatives. As a child of the greasy 1950’s, I found capital-R Revolution revolting: its runny blemishes, more telling than its watery promises. Among its worst failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing better than the inadmissible present, with frequent backslides. Revolutionary dialectics (and all the theses that sprang from them) struck me as so much cheap talk—culture’s inflamed reaction to orthodoxy’s stunted mediocrity.
No Great Book On Peace exists, even though students cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me, I’ve searched the stacks in vain, for On Peace.
Midway through my mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and fed up with it – I began combing available libraries for a primer on the administration of world peace. You know, a real civics lesson for a serious world citizen? So what if it were nothing but science fiction and wild-eyed speculation? I’d settle for that!
All I found was On War and elementary textbooks on weapon management. There were countless histories, devout religious tomes, pompous political screeds, literary soap operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles -- each sustained weapon mentality and diverted our attention from what should have been our primary study all along: peace mentality. Otherwise, they talked about feelings or sentiment or technicalities or meaningless abstractions or some such worthless trash. As my readings grew more voracious and less choosy, they led me to more and more ponderous, elaborate and boring affirmations of weapon mentality. A mountain range of useless trivia aside, I found very little else, to tell you the truth.
Avid for the peace primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would never dare call it On Peace. Only a global consensus of Learners, assembled in the World Virtual Agora, could begin to compose such a work in a thousand million volumes. Nowadays, there are none.
Even if Learners fits all alone on a virtual library bookshelf under a non-existent call number (no Dewey Decimal number for peace, the Library of Congress prefix JX no longer used), its scribe – no matter how pride-scoured – cannot claim copyright for the ideals of peace. The gold dust of peace mentality may lie buried under mounds of weapon mentality dross, but hints of its color glimmer from all of our masterworks. Where did Learners’ opulent forbears go? They disappeared, replaced by weapon Classics we’ve been forced to study all our lives.
This text reconsiders a vital choice between the mentalities of weapons and peace. Every moment we endure here on Earth, we connive with this evil or defy it, whether we admit this to ourselves or not. These days, weapon mentality dominates our thinking without serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon technologies harvest evermore victims, since everyone submits to weapon mentality without a second thought. Also, no wonder that every progressive aspiration must shudder to a halt in this Sargasso Sea of weapon mentality. What surprise is there in that? This social defect is so prevalent and predictable, we shouldn’t even feel disappointed by it. Once we shift the focus of our faith from weapons to peace, we may yet thrive along with all the rest of our progressive hopes. Until then, forget them and us.
Since you begin to grasp the central premise of Learners, you may spit it out: a common enough gag reflex. “World peace? PeaceWorld? Shut up! I’m through!” If you value controversy in your mental landscape, ask yourself: “Why have I dismissed this topic without fair hearing? During my lengthy examination of countless other topics at school, why didn’t someone sit me down and make me think this through?”
I’ll tell you why. Emerging from infancy into frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually long before we do so emotionally and socially. Society exploits this offset development. It offers us a predictable life cycle: from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty, and then the mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence.
Like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency in our own mediocrity (by default). Forced to surrender a healthy conscience and replace it with passive-aggressive compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed, we soothe our heartache with ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur obsession, professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. From these escapisms, take your pick.
The reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. Suppressing youthful idealism is a pseudo-skill each of us is called upon to master. Shouldn’t their creative drive be our first priority?
Do you remember when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Recall the salvo of insults that met your first, childlike questions about world peace. No matter to whom you turned – to strangers or beloved, enlightened teachers or dumb brutes – you ran the same gauntlet of veiled insult, condescension and violence if you persisted.
Think back. “World Peace? End poverty? Feed and care for everyone in perfect equity? Get real, stop dreaming, grow up! What do I need to do, grab you by the shoulders and shake?”
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very subtle indoctrination in as many lines of text. But you get my point.
On this WeaponWorld of ours, a so-called “happy childhood” is the rare one during which inescapable trauma and injustice are inflicted a little later, at random, by surprise and by strangers.
Did this ceaseless brainwash while you were young and impressionable—did it bring you up short? Was your conscience battered silent? Did you suspend disbelief to avoid rejection? Did you enslave yourself to it, regardless of its merit? Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? Did you ever have a choice?
“Crimestop means
the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought. It includes the power
of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding
the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and of being bored and
repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical
direction. Crimestop, in short, means
protective stupidity.” George Orwell, 1984, the New American Library, Inc., New
York, 1961, p. 174.
See The 1984 Syndrome.
We stopped short because Everyman silenced us the moment we started asking awkward questions. Our culture subverts pacifism and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and waterborne pestilence. Both are lethal to a primitive society and both are suppressed. We are potty trained, as children, against peace and valid spirituality.
One arises from the other, don’t you think? In the absence of peace, wouldn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, doesn't our spirit turn into a monstrous caricatures of itself, sneering at our hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad?
Are we ready to yell enough at this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been, will we ever be more ready?
As with our weapon religions and their relevance to God, it doesn’t matter how much mouth-jabber we devote to peace. We are just as averse to it as to excrement. As a result we face unlimited social contradictions and zero closure, resolution or clarity.
Sure, I can understand your fear and loathing, but can’t let that stop me. You and other Learners, join me instead! We’re grownups, now, apparently immune to childhood blame. Unplug your ears – there, that’s better – and pay attention. Learners retrieves painful questions we let drop when we were kids, with or without our honest consent.
As this Aquarian Age dawns, it’s a sorry state we submit to. Snake oil democracy and chainsaw logic promote arrogant mismanagement. Fate’s idiot smile favors Conspiracies of Greed. Smirking predators gang-rape Blind Justice before our disbelieving eyes. They laugh all the way to their bank, congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés jam our constellation of political metaphors, despite their spectacular failure—or hadn’t you noticed? Like nitwit kibitzers around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need more Love, personal perfection, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science, Submission, Family Values, Free Markets – straighter politicians, fairer bullies and kinder Fat Cats.” In short, some purer dictatorship of fathead fatuity. Even more widespread and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but earning and spending your next buck. Be cool, be a steady fool, like us.”
Stupefied by all this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster in four-part harmony. Others pray that swift Apocalypse deliver them pretty please. Stupefied by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world merely to hasten the Ending they crave.
Thus do we deny the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends a thousand times a day. According to this Miracle, a far greater wisdom awaits us. It could replace typhoons of venom with windfalls of abundance. Fantastic plenty could bloom where wastelands now fester; full justice, salve ancient traumas and about-face mutinous legions back to civility.
Imagine that! Cast off your silly panic and start visualizing the best that could happen. Learners are waiting for your arrival.
Instead, weapon dissidents and weapon reactionaries croak contrapuntal duets of hoary dogma. They obsess over the hated Other and plot His impossible destruction. Others sit on their hands, until everyone becomes an angel or until Christ returns to deliver us (whichever comes first).
Everything is improvised. No one has any idea what he’s talking about and no one has a workable plan except for more killing—sit still for it or stir it up worse. No one listens to anyone; the major perk of promotion to power, these days, is no longer having to listen to anyone; just issue a series of insane orders unmindful of reality—the recipe for guaranteed disaster. Nothing else is tolerated.
We are only permitted two kinds of politicians, nowadays: those who have quashed every good idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a nasty idea they didn’t love (Republicans). Like a village blacksmith lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. Yet their obsolete political vocabularies won’t let them comprehend the world’s most basic contradictions and opportunities. They want to fix a 1950 Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy tools.
Only the absolute justice of our cause keeps it alive—not our necrotic habits of thought and speech. Poisoned by gangrenous ideologies and rejecting them, we’ve grown so credophobic that we refuse to believe anything any longer. Force-fed meaningless commercial blather, our moral gyros tumbled, we’ve lost our last spirit toeholds and fallen into riptides of change.
But don’t despair. Heed Jesse Jackson and “Keep hope alive!” As with two post-war Germanys, reactionaries will hand over a basket case for us to reanimate, once it appears too late to salvage anything from the wreckage. Learners anticipates that handover—this time, of the whole world. Up to us to rebuild everything!
You might recall some movie where ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and security. By midway through the story, the Good are dumbfounded. No one knows what to do next.
Then someone – perhaps Ruth – says, “Hold on, I have a plan.” Rather than turn away in despair, passive bystanders start paying miraculous attention. Inspired, they turn into heroes. By that time, for the sake of dramatic continuity, the camera cuts to the triumph of the Good.
This book itemizes the vital steps between ‘no plan’ and ‘plan in action.’ During this critical but no-fun stage, we should discuss our plan in detail, expose its inherent weaknesses, suggest better alternatives and coordinate our timing and chronology. Let daring volunteers take on tasks that fit their special interests and talents. All you reductive meliorists out there, who’ve pounded the steering wheel in stalled cars for the last few thousand years, start your engines! Shake awake all those who’ve abstained from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a scheme, and here it is, as follows. We are at this essential if boring stage of the procedure. Proceed accordingly and with dispatch, I implore you.
Some warnings before we begin. This book’s eccentric prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculation will make very hard reading. We’re gonna make warfare illegal, here, across the planet—not bake a simple cake. You’ll find no easy sound bites in these pages, no quick fixes and none of the simplistic TV pabulum you’ve grown accustomed to. You may click back, now, if that was all you came here looking for.
Treat Learners as a rough guide, clearer than run-on Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber. Evenhandedly, it beckons ecstatic Nobel laureates, berserkers with nothing left to lose, aimless idealists, madrassa dreamers, dissatisfied bonzes, Talmud scholars and Bible seminarians, prep-schooled sellouts and ghetto luminaries defying the evils that wriggle just beyond their own brown study. It speaks just as much to every Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze of weapons and peace, as to my childhood ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address these words in equal parts to next year’s applicants to the War Academies and next year’s crop of middle school prodigies. The best among you sought the literature of peace in the library stacks of weapons administration, to no avail.
This book outlines what we were driven to discover and failed to find. California dreamin’, it surfs the riptides of chaos and the undertows of paradox. Irritably, it tosses aside treasured concepts and reconsiders much-maligned ideas.
My message is very biased. Attacking sly platitudes, its arguments climb way out on shaky limbs—farther out than you may wish to follow. You’ll find no ‘detachment’, ‘disinterest’ or ‘balance’ here, as those terms are misused today. Given this topic’s infinite complexity, my writing numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
What’s more, I’ll turn every rhetorical cannon against the weapon mentors who drilled me on them. Horrified and enraged, I’ll invoke any fallacy more useful than its ‘logically correct’ counterpart. I have no use for proponents of ‘logical analysis’ who dare permit children to starve to death and turn their backs when such awkward topics encroach on their blank spirit. In the same spirit, Learners will revive PeaceWorld by shamelessly appropriating every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call that has lulled us to sleep up ‘til now.
If the dry logic of world peace is all you seek, read Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War & Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944. Back then, President Roosevelt and his brilliant staffers anticipated a popular, one-world government that would have criminalized warfare across the planet and guaranteed human rights for all – seventy years ago, with 150 million fewer war dead and a couple billion fewer dead of famine and preventable disease than we “enlightened” contemporaries are responsible for―and how many thousands of trillions of cash in vital assets and sabotaged ingenuity thrown away with our consent?
How dare you suggest it’s none of your doing! Quit lying to yourself, here at least. We are all 100% accountable.
Alas, American Weapon Party commissars made sure a failed haberdasher, Harry Truman, would grab the reins of power from Roosevelt’s dying hands. Hiroshima, my love? Truman and his small-town, small-mind cronies threw away the goodwill America had earned by liberating the world from fascism. Just like Bush and his rat pack did after 9/11. They’ve groomed a succession of politically correct mediocrities, since. Their parochial prejudices have allowed no alternative but another hundred and fifty million war dead, and another half-century of bankrupt weapon management.
Still today, we waste precious time and talent pointlessly protesting their mighty warmonger initiatives. Let them protest, in absolute futility, our mighty peace initiatives—never again the other way around!
This text is a speculative entertainment and an impassioned rally cry, not some textbook drear. Neither fiction nor non-, it fits in somewhere between confession, screed and sketchbook of homilies, anecdotes and conjectures. As Margaret Atwood puts it, forecast journalism. There is no other text like it and I can find no political group that would adopt it as its own. Were that I could! I would not have felt so abandoned on this planet of unrepentant killer primates. I have no faith in my own generation (good for nothing but Bush the Lesser and his National Capitalist cronies) nor the one that follows; perhaps the following one… Learners will certainly arise as a political party in the future—perhaps after I’m gone, as with Marx, Rousseau and Erasmus.
“So it happens that beyond the imaginary demarcation line
between past and present, the writer still finds himself eye to eye with the
human condition, which he is bound to observe and understand as best he can,
with which he must identify, giving it the strength of his breath and the
warmth of his blood, which he must attempt to turn into the living texture of
the story that he intends to translate for his readers, in such a way that the
result be as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as possible.” Ivo Andrić,
Acceptance Speech for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"If humanity bears an eternal truth, it is certainly
that tragic hesitation of the man who will someday be called, for centuries
hence, an artist – facing the artwork that he experiences more deeply than
anyone, that he admires the way none other can, yet that he, alone on Earth,
wants to destroy sub rasa at the same time."
"So let’s understand this fully: if genius is a
discovery, it is upon this discovery that the resurrection of the past is
based. At the start of this speech, I
spoke about what a renaissance could be, what the heritage of a culture could
be. A culture is reborn when men of
genius, seeking their own truth, draw from the depths of centuries everything
that formerly resembled this truth, even if they don’t recognize it." André Malraux, Les Conquérants, (The Conquerors), Le livre de poche, © Bernard Grasset, 1928, pages 311-13.
“The leader carries all of our confusion with him as he
attempts to climb above society in search of a clear view that would indicate
the right way. There, on his imaginary
mountain, he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below, half
struggling with mortality in our consoling maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance,
lost in our earthly eternity. But how is
he to get his own reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure
itself respond to his efforts?” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s
Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random
House, 1991, p. 349.
Accept those parts of Learners you hearken to, then make something better happen. Dismiss anything you find in here that disconcerts your fancy—as conjecture, hearsay, heresy, what you will.
If this work inspires you to frame some new idea, let me know. I’d love to filigree new ideas into the next rewrite of this text (with proper attribution, of course). With a little luck, I may get to chronicle the real-world progress of this righteous endeavor … perhaps in future chapters of this samizdat.
Why do the terms ‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’ consign our highest values to the trash heap? When did reactionary chic make it unfashionable to do the utmost good?
We may be clumsy practitioners of peace, at first, but the love of good throbs in our veins. No word for this talent exists (kalotropism?) but it will not be denied much longer. Who knows; doing good may become fashionable, once again, despite the mightiest efforts of the worst among us, to forbid and ridicule it.
Loudmouthed morality truants feign sophistication by aggravating our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign ‘do-gooders’ and ‘bleeding hearts’. Hiding their shameful shortcomings, they confabulate the pig-headed terminology and criminal line-up of reactionary correctness. They’ve built up an assembly line of conmen and professional hypocrites who are (literally) politically correct enough to serve as stand-ins for legitimate leaders. Each candidate worse than his predecessors, while people of talent and genius are chased from politics and social commentary; either gunned down in the street or crucified by the media.
Who are these malingerers? Do-badders? Flinty hearts? Do a few stony hearts require a little lubricant bleeding to re-oxygenate their owners’ flat-lined conscience?
After so many tries, why don’t we have the best possible government? And don’t you dare suggest we have the best government already. Be honest with yourself, here, if nowhere else. With all our schools, books and teachers, why aren’t there millions of peace mentors out there, enriching the abundance that is our due, filling the world with miraculous technologies, sacred wildlife, courtly love and random acts of kindness? Where did the superb replacements of young Andy Carnegie, the Roosevelts and Little Flower LaGuardia go, that the administration of excellence demands? Where have you gone!
If we considered this world one Great Academy – as Learners hope it shall become – most of its students major in some aspect of weapon technology while all too few take too few electives in peace. As the machinery of war grinds on without letup, only its most devoted slaves may evaluate its usefulness in public discourse.
Hardly anyone can list the great peace mentors; I know I couldn’t. Peace’s foremost practitioners have been unassuming gentlefolk. Female peace practitioners are as under-reported here, as they have been in general history. Compare this blitzed state of ignorance with our household familiarity with Genghis Khan, Hitler and like masters of mayhem. If peace were our first priority – not mass murder – this Learner deficit would cause us grave concern. Nothing of the kind concerns us, since we are first and foremost weapon slaves.
Your first appraisal of Learners may make you dizzy, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic. We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Of necessity, our first review will be insolently superficial and subject to myth-based denial at every page-turn. Once this crisis has passed, we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first few chapters of Learners to take in its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Thereafter, resume your random perusal in any of its three Sections:
SECTION I) Why we’re in this mess;
SECTION II) How we approach PeaceWorld; and
SECTION III) What results we may expect.
The first and harshest Section, “Why,” stretches midway through Learners. Why is so incendiary, its first-time readers risk burnout. Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook great evils we’ve been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem wearisome at first, mind-numbing later and soon unbearable. Your subconscious will revisit every aversion therapy you suffered as a child, to get you to quit. You’ll grow frustrated with this reading, then nauseated by it and soon enraged. You’ll have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to its dregs. Take tiny sips of that sour mash and find more syrupy refreshment elsewhere, perhaps at the titty of TV.
Just don’t give up. I might as well have entitled Why, How and What—Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet “How” lists unfortunate tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter “What” sketches peaceful alternatives to the weapon technologies we submit to today—assuming global majorities have grasped Why and How beforehand.
This text is intended for every Learner to come. Its discontent should have been our patrimony and was—since forgotten. I leave the Sections Who, When and Where to you, my beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my extraordinary mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of proof.
I may have found a hassle-free way to gatecrash heaven, merely by reincarnating into Jesus Christ’s lifeline the next time I die. I believe this painful redemption is open to all of us, no matter how heavy our Karmic burden. I repeat myself to emphasize this crucial concept.
This exotic doctrine might shut down fundamentalists’ idiotic diktat, once and for all. Its universal acceptance would eject all those fundamentalist middlemen unworthy of spiritual discourse. By what right, wisdom or benediction do they claim to butt in there, anyway? It would put the Kingdom of Heaven within everyone’s reach in the afterlife, regardless of truth or error in this lifetime, entrust earthly cares to our own accountability, and our salvation to the Lord’s direct tutelage.
Once you grasp this idea and its outcomes, no pompous bigot can lecture, weasel or torture them out of you. You will be completely free to save your soul, miraculously free. Or you may return to these endless lives as often as you wish, as a Bodhisattva—provided this lesson awaits you here, the next time you come around, and hasn’t been silenced by Godless fundamentalists and indifferent idiots, as so often in the past and present.
We may serve God or Mammon, but not both at once. Learners suggests how to serve this world gracefully and Grace in the next. If you dismiss the above-stated as some worthless, Bible-thumping crankdom (more fundamentalist babble), you missed my point entirely. And, my friend, that is your loss. Check out the “reincarnating” link above, and see for yourself.
If you take your weapons indoctrination too seriously, you may expect to sort religion from government as independent variables. Forget it. We are progressives insofar our faith (in whatever) induces fearless love in us, and reactionaries when we react (faithlessly) against the shadow of our fears and hatred. Our creeds and governments are one and the same. It doesn’t matter what phony drapes we use to cover the religious underpinnings of government, the same way prudish Victorians used to drape piano legs to prevent sexual excitation.
These assertions may sound like pure arrogance to you. I assure you, they’ve been as carefully thought out as any you’ll find in Learners. It’s up to you to discuss them, once and for all.
One of Christ’s parables (the Parable of the Talents: Matthew 25-14) entrusts risk-taking coinage to each of His servants. The Lord intends us to manage our lives for the profit of our souls, not mere risk-reduction. As stunt persons in this universal action feature, we’re here to take enormous risks. Safe mediocrity must be illusory, since everything kills us in the end. In our mortality reside our glory and our salvation.
I’m surprised how little this epiphany alters what I must say in Learners. Even more surprising will be our grand exploits once we’ve claimed grace in this world and Grace in the next.
At most, these meditations have turned my fortune or failure on this material plane into the blinding glare one gets off wavelets during tardy, sun-dappled afternoons. Transient and annoying at worst, they are beautiful despite their ache, and soon to fade.
I have given up on free advice to “Live each day as if it were your first and last.” How hormonally unworkable! I look forward to each day’s end, now. My sorriest sleeping dream has turned out to be more interesting than the most spectacular and moving epic I’ve ever read in a book or watched on the screen. I suspect that the after-death experience, properly negotiated, is at least that much better than life, or better yet. Good music, good lovin’ and a few good friends, along with some other things during this lifetime (like laughter, and great meals, and just helping somebody), they’re something else; they make the pain of living bearable. I counsel no-one to abandon them prematurely, no matter what fate our souls may have in store. It seems obvious that we have something important to learn in the here-and-now.
I had no choice but to write and rewrite – en deux langues (in two languages) – this book, this whole book and nothing but this book. In the end, I can only justify my presumption by pointing out the depths of our moral bankruptcy … and of our craving for Peace.
“Your isolation is not so much the direct result of enemy
action as of the fact that when you travel this road your experiences are
shared by fewer and fewer people, until at last
there’s no one to whom you can make yourself understood.” Sarah Patton Boyle, “Spit in the Devil’s Eye:
A Southern Heretic Speaks,” from the October 20, 1956 issue of The Nation
magazine © 1956. The Nation Company,
LP. Reprinted with permission. Also found in The Nation 1865-1990,
Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Ed., p. 214.
Secretly, throughout history, weapons and peace mentors have diced for our wealth, talent, faith, bodies, posterity, sanity and Holy Spirit—the whole caboodle. The first sought to protect us militarily from the Other and protect themselves from us; the second, to accept the Other and ourselves in peace.
You would find the same conflict between the mentors of weapons and peace—whether among whites or blacks; Chinese, Argentineans, New Zealanders or Greenlanders; capitalists, communists, socialists or fascists (progressive or reactionary); among atheists, agnostics, deists, Christians, Muslims, Pagans, or Buddhists (whether fundamentalist or ecumenical); as much among stone-tooled jungle dwellers as among sky scraper tenants handling information technology.
No difference whatsoever when it comes to this universal confrontation. Nobody is better off, no-one is immune. Certainly not you or me, not the Pope or the Dalai Lama—despite all our prejudices of denial.
Is that fully understood?
This contest has cut right across every social divide we hold dear. Age, sex, race, class, religion, ideology, geography and politics—mere window-dressing. They’ve distracted us from our primary task: peace on Earth, once and for all.
The Weapon/Peace Dialectic regulates our political dialog across a rigid Cartesian coordinate. Each of us and each of our nation-states must communicate with a forked tongue. Its two tines (one controlled by weapon mentors, the other by peace mentors) share three traits. They are:
·
Dialectical: parallel along the axis of understanding;
·
Antithetical: at right angles to each other's beliefs; and
· Antinomial: directly contradicting each other’s projected outcomes.
This thrice-knotted, forked-tongue garble induces the Weapon/Peace Antinomy: absolute disparity between methods used, goals sought and results achieved.
Let me offer you this example. There are thousands more, and you may come up with your own, once you grasp the concept. My example will be the term “utopia.”
Along the first, dialectical axis, Utopia is a classic text whose author, Sir Thomas More, described a “perfect” social order. Everyone agrees that his utopia is not an accurate historical representation, is irrelevant to present circumstances, and impossible in the future. What a perfect model! But this is the nearest that most scholars of the Western Enlightenment dare approach the idea of PeaceWorld. There are a handful of later texts, just as obscure and poorly thought out.
Reactionaries and progressives agree that this is all the documentation they need, to judge the relative merits of weapon mentality and peace mentality. Might as well cross the Rocky Mountains, guided by a map of Pangaea.
If you’re interested, Lewis Mumford summarizes about two dozen principal texts in English (several thousand pages worth) in the first 150 pages of his book The Story of Utopias. Don’t ask me what he intended to convey in the last half.
So far, so good. At least along the dialectical axis, everyone may share the same meaning in their words.
Along the second, antithetical axis, the word utopia signifies for weapon mentors, “that (place) which may never be.” Utopia is their preferred reference text, taught in every high school and college. It confirms their deep conviction that peaceful and benevolent societies are impossible. For peace mentors, utopia means “that (place) which is not, but might be.” Utopia is a narrow speculation of theirs, upon which to build a brighter peace.
Don’t ask me why progressives haven’t published a dozen better books, since. Craven subservience to weapon mentors, flawed imagination, subconscious approval of the status quo or mere mental inertia: the ultimate reason for their failure is beyond my feeble reckoning of submission to evil.
Note how the two basic belief structures are set at right angles to each other, yet use the same (parallel) terminology.
Along the third, antinomial axis, weapon mentors use the word utopian like an adverbial clause: “When pigs fly and hell freezes over.” Any idea branded utopian can be dismissed by reflex, without further consideration. Peace mentors use it to describe a social scheme that intends to improve current reality, whether or not it might be valid and practical. In other words, the peaceful version of the word utopia signifies "something good we should strive for," whereas the weapon version means "a horror to be avoided like the plague…Not only useless, but somehow poisonous."
Thus, along the antinomial axis, the ultimate intention on each side is headed in exactly the opposite direction. What was once a conversation is now a tug of war.
Nowadays, weapon mentality dominates our words, arguments and intentions; just as weapon technology dominates our material lives. We seek to survive in peace despite this universal dominance.
We owe it to ourselves to clarify this antinomy. Our synchronization of meaning, definition and intent – and the clarity it may bring to public discourse – promise us security, abundance and fellow feeling beyond our understanding.
Our institutions and cultures retain a few peace remnants we should cultivate, and dominant weapon memes we should render vestigial. Until we clarify these ideas, they are equally suspect (including our favorites) and valid (including those we most despise). This book revalidates the ideas I believe are most auspicious and marginalizes the remainder.
In this book, we will use the words ‘weapon’ and ‘weapons’ interchangeably. Rather than use them simply as nouns, we will wield them as modifiers: weapon technology and peace technology. From now on, ‘weapon’ will precede words that begin with a consonant, and ‘weapons’ anticipate those that begin with a vowel. Let the grammarians scream.
The text below separates the weapon/peace antinomy into four word-pairs:
· Weapon mentality
· Weapon technology
· Peace mentality
· Peace technology
Weapon Mentality relies on fear, and fear rules our world.
“… [The English
historian, Thomas] Carlyle said that the great element
missing from our attempted entry into the past is Fear; he set himself to
re-enact it, and succeeded extraordinarily well. His syntax is designed to embody a distracted
groping for certainties in a fog of rumour and of
events at best only half-understood, in moods of acute anxiety, rage and
sometime dangerous exaltation.” John
Burrow, A History of Histories: Epic, Chronicles,
Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth century, Alfred A.
Knopf, New York, 2008, page 362.
To secure its adherents from overwhelming dread, weapon managers develop threat deterrents they believe so ghastly that none dare challenge them. Alas, WeaponWorld preordains this challenge: “The best defense is a good offense.”
In this text, we’ll avoid terms like ‘war mentality’ and ‘warfare mentality’. War mentality is to weapon mentality what road rage is to defensive driving. Neither weapon managers nor defensive drivers prefer a violent collision. If a crash does occur, it’s because things got out of hand. More or less realistically, they believe their efforts will avert it.
Only rarely will we use terms like militarism or fascism as substitutes for weapon mentality. Much more widespread and subtle, this mentality infects ‘free’ democracies as readily as dictatorships. Indeed, free citizens of free republics are better weapon technicians than the slaves of a dictator. A people that calls itself peace-loving can manage its killing much more skillfully than another that shrieks for foreign blood.
If you consider yourself a lover of peace, pure beyond reproach – even though you’ve never bothered to sort your peace and weapon priorities – you’re actually a weapon fellow traveler and a pillar of the weapon status quo.
Like alcoholics in denial, we worsen our addiction to weapon mentality insofar we deny it.
Weapon mentality inflicts social distortions on purpose. Poverty, rigid hierarchy, injustice, inequality, underemployment, nurtured criminality, substandard education, malnutrition and professional arrogance—the list goes on and on. We mistake them as regrettable outcomes of stupidity, bigotry, insanity, greed, crime, honest error and disaster; we refuse to believe they are allowed to fester on purpose, to further the goals of weapon mentality.
Social reformers imagine they can improve things reductively, gradually and incrementally—problem-by-problem, identity position by identity position and topic by topic. Using the same scattered methods and reductive reasoning, they’ve failed for the last five thousand years.
The only solution to this problem is holistic, simultaneous and global peace mentality – agreed upon by almost everyone – followed by a cascading swarm of atomistic and reductive fixes. Long-term success is impossible in the opposite order, since each small fix will be paralyzed by the holistic, simultaneous and global counter-force of weapon mentality as worshipped these days.
A society, any society, measures itself against a Constellation of Political Metaphors its members agree to share. The one we share is crammed with Weapon Myths. Many common policies and beliefs of religion, law and morality constitute Weapon Mythology: popular rationalizations for our most irrational practices and institutions. Since the basic values of weapon mentality are insane to anyone with the slightest love for and understanding of peace, weapon mentors must impose their own mythic vocabulary and syntax, immune to peace mentors' reasonable criticism.
For weapons managers to succeed, all they need to be is reliably incompetent at peace. Military technology is the only field at which they must excel (mercilessly graded by Darwinian selection on the battlefield); every other field of endeavor can be ventured with relative incompetence, and still fulfill their requirements. Within those limits, the worse they manage peace, the better they will succeed at war. Weapons technicians rule because it is much less bitter to fail at peace and triumph at war, than to succeed at peace and lose at war.
A common weapon refrain is: “You’re not paid to think about such things; we are.”
Information proletarians are enslaved by their deprivation of valid information. Junk data, served piping hot and fresh to them every day, maintains their servile status. Most often, you and I fit in somewhere here. At other times, our loyalties sparkle between these meta-groups, rather like energy quanta between the atomic shells of a world-sized molecule.
As information proletarians learn, work and play, they produce wealth while sustaining themselves and their beloved. Much smaller groups (called Information Elites) seize most of this wealth, in the name of Military Security, and use it to defray the anti-profit costs of their Weapon Technologies.
These costs go well beyond mere peacetime expenditures for weapons and soldiers, far beyond that. When comparing the economics of a peaceful society to that of a weapons society, an accurate contrast would be between the wealth of Geneva and Mogadishu, or between the athletic performance of an Olympic runner loping his favorite race, versus that of a wounded soldier dragging his best buddy’s body and their equipment to the rear.
I’ve seriously considered opting for the terms Opinion Elite and Opinion Proletariat. Those terms emphasize the fleeting nature of these prejudices, and the information elite's paradoxical lack of merit. Opinion elites believe that their prejudices are a cut above everyone else’s; opinion proletarians have convinced themselves that their preferences are second-rate compared to those of opinion elites. Well-entrenched in the media and schools, opinion elites fervently endorse this inferiority complex.
This may be the root cause why an overwhelming majority of progressives (relying on reason) never overcomes a tiny minority of weapon managers (and their shameless reliance on sociopathic bullshit). Ah yes, I nearly forgot! That, and the knee-jerk reflex of reactionaries, to kill and torture a large number people at random, whenever they feel seriously challenged—either in the cellars of the secret police during mass unemployment, or in the trenches of a war arranged for that purpose alone, or both as often in succession as deemed necessary to renew the proletariat’s reluctant submission.
Info Elites and weapon managers are interchangeable among different nation-states, religious affiliations and political organizations. They include our rulers, their staff, media workers, judges, teachers, priests, politicians and other key misinformation and disinformation professionals―whether or not they know what they’re doing and why they are doing it. They consider themselves superior to their proletarian hosts – from whom they spring and upon whom they depend – the same way a precocious junior might scorn his humble guardians.
In the beginning, info proletarians chose their first elites from among themselves. Thereafter, info elites promoted their replacements from the info proletariat. It didn’t matter whether they did so through princely privilege, democratic election, religious hierarchy, Soviet nomination, robber barony or whatever. It didn’t matter if the political setting was a kraal of mud huts, a stinking feudal barony or a continent-spanning, multi-ethnic, military-industrial Empire.
It never mattered whether weapon managers were enslaved or free, secular or religious, centralized or profit-oriented, plebian or noble, criminal or authorized, professional or amateur. Identical weapons elites emerged in any case, with remarkably similar mind-set, attitude and reflexive behavior. Their talk might have changed over time and under different circumstances – cynically, opportunistically and with prejudice – but their walk never did. Except, perhaps, for honor …
Learners must appeal foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every noble warrior, which cleanses him of his filth. Real warriors will instantly recognize honor and defend it against any crazy deviant lacking it, lethal as he may be. That honor will inspire PeaceWorld and defend it fiercely from then on. Honor and Learning should become one. After all, one learns honor.
Information elites convince the information proletariat that their weapon management best suits everyone’s needs (an obvious lie). They employ:
·
Weapon
Mentors to broadcast this fabrication during pseudo-peace, and
· Weapon Sectarians to do so more forcefully in times of war.
The information elite is no smarter than the information proletariat from which it springs. Its members merely promote weapon mentality and themselves in the short term. They do so by censoring important information and drowning this censorship in a tsunami of babble and lies. Those smart and conscientious enough to criticize this poor bargain are marginalized.
This triage “in the name of obedience and loyalty” dumbs down those chosen (and self-chosen) to remain in power, collectively and automatically. After they have held sway for a while, weapons elites drift onto the razor reefs of their own social contradictions. Quite predictably, they sink into ritual cruelty, institutional terror and routine corruption (see “Ritual Stupidity”).
Information elites can practice one of three broad categories of information politics. The first two categories simplify information content; the third complexifies it. Transitions between these categories are gradual and flexible; they can go backwards or forwards—they need not be categorical, abrupt or progressive.
1. Politicians (or Elites) of Misinformation broadcast as many lies as possible. This is standard behavior for tyrants modern and ancient. Anything not a forbidden truth becomes a mandatory lie. Misinformation politics creates top-down battle management systems that seem optimized for war. Think of Stalin and Saddam Hussein.
Broadcasting misinformation and discerning the truth become relatively simple tasks. In most cases of this kind of politics, the exact opposite of anything relayed through official monologue media is closer to the truth.
Misinformation politics breed paranoia, suspicion and terror. Nothing is as it seems, and no one can be trusted. Under this claustrophobic compulsion, the information elite shrinks to a bare minimum and then purges itself beyond that. Brain-dead dogma becomes manifest reality, repeated mindlessly across every medium. Rather than merely manipulate mass opinion, misinfo elites fantasize that they can transform reality itself—as on paper, so in reality. They kill and terrorize their proletarian hosts until this fantasy replaces common sense.
Gangsters rule, while self-blinded misinformation politicians wage holy war against Learner creativity. Society runs on its own inertia and feeds off its last reserves, until it grinds to a halt and starvation looms. The end result is brutal foreign warfare and internal genocide to confirm official propaganda: the ultimate simplification of public reality.
We can rate misinfo elites by their ‘hardness.’ How hard does the elite make it for the info proletariat to survive? The harsher the tyranny, the worse the politics of misinformation.
‘Softer’ tyrannies are richer; they replace misinformation politics with disinformation politics. Disinformation is much more subtle and difficult to manage than misinformation.
As a weapon state matures, the defects of its misinformation politics become more and more blatant. Lying yields nothing but stolen wealth and its entropy into chaos—sustainable wealth grows from the truth and trust in its legitimacy. Thoughtful reformers attempt to weave a few strands of peace mentality (including a bit of information politics) into the rotten basketwork of weapon management. This conglomeration of opposites cannot hold together for very long. Instead, it polarizes corrupt weapon managers against frustrated weapon dissidents, in a centrifuge of disinformation politics. Here we are, ruled by...
2. Disinformation elites that include a mix of so-called populists and liberals with a hard core of reactionaries who rule in the end on every important issue. Together, they broadcast their endless semi-monologue through extensive hierarchies of corporations, governments and/or religions. Unlike politicians of misinformation, they permit carefully screened feedback in minute doses.
The key word in disinformation politics is "but." As in: "We hear your calls for reform, and understand that true morality, morale and efficiency dictate that we do things better; but …” there follows a long list of excuses why inefficient and immoral practices must remain routine.
“Please be more reasonable, ladies and gentlemen. What you propose would be impractical, too costly, subject to abuse by thugs, inconsistent with our most cherished and ancient protocols, etc., etc. ...” Ephemeral religious dogma, ideological gobbledygook, distortions of history, exquisitely written literary blather, commercial advertising, sports babble, arena violence, empty show trials, soap opera trivia, “scientific” data and “mathematical” conclusions that wind up being utterly false: the whole broadcast through monologue media—endlessly, from as many sources as possible, in lavish detail, with painful exactitude and at enormous volume.
Significant matters are lied about obsessively, usually by omission. This trancelike state becomes hypnotic and self-reinforcing. Producers and spectators alike refuse to distinguish obvious lies from the truth. Disinfo elites are just as vulnerable to their own disinformation as their host proletariat. Destructive activities increase, while real wealth evaporates. The populace ignores its greatest strengths and perils, in favor of greater and greater elaborations of trivia. It is easily convinced of its imaginary wealth when it is on the verge of bankruptcy and vice versa. Public policies become arbitrary and vacillating, without moral or ideological basis. The regime improvises as it goes along, and its outcomes suffer accordingly.
Useless and trivial information becomes easier (cheap or free) to find and more profitable to produce, while the useful kind becomes harder to broadcast and acquire (more expensive, “unprofitable” and laborious). Belief in anything but rabid commercialism, faith in anything but naked greed and senile dogma, all but those are forbidden by universal consent and popular culture.
Disinfo elites turn into bloated Mandarinates. Through the active promotion of certified mediocrities and authoritative conmen, gifted Learners are relegated to info proletarian status and sub-creative frustration. These habits of deliberate misunderstanding, consensus oversimplification and social mediocrity are only reversed in times of war, when many frustrated talents are recruited into revitalized weapon cadres.
I recall seeing a photograph of workers leaving an American naval shipyard at the end of the workday, back during World War II. An enormous sign was posted over the entrance: “Tell us your good ideas!” No such sign would have graced a similar factory gate at the same time in history, had it been between two wars.
Just as a slap in the face will stop a fit of hysterics – and a deep kiss, likewise – mass trauma is the usual method to halt this delusional state. Without warning, disaster and warfare strike, because no one bothered to address important issues preemptively. Everyone is so surprised when their sand castles crumble simultaneously. Afterwards, disinfo elites declare war—a much simpler task than promoting additional abundance and fellow feeling. Mass murder becomes the norm once again. By then, it’s too late to adopt peaceful politics of information, since the requisite wealth and unstressed, unpanicked populations went to waste.
Learners – by the way – is the kiss.
Rarely, peace dissidents manage to overcome this social inertia and spread the good news that everyone should share Learning even-handedly. If info elites begin to pay miraculous attention to this idea and start broadcasting it, they work themselves out of the job of restricting information flow. At that point, info elites and proletariats merge into an Information (or Learner) Commonwealth.
3. Politicians of Information would generate truth and lies on every topic, without prejudice or favor, for Learners to sort out among themselves. A Learner Commonwealth would emerge through unrestricted public discourse and extensive dialogues between self-selected info-jurors. They would pursue their topics of passion without regard to wealth or status—since those would be theirs by right, in an Information Commonwealth.
Many statements that appear to be lies are just more complex elaborations of the truth. Whether through literary fiction, new ideologies, academic postulates, inventions, discoveries or reinterpretations of ancient dogma: the truth prevails because it is more profitable in peaceful settings. People revalue information that seems more important to them than the expensive artifacts and mythmaking about military security.
Taking the opposite tack, misinformation societies opt for nothing but lies and terror. The truth becomes least profitable, because it will get you killed on the spot. No such choice remains in disinformation societies, where white noise drowns out everything else—until the World Trade Towers come tumbling down in controlled demolition. Everyone scrambles to resume the reassuring chatter of fallacious normalcy, thus exposing their neck to the next chop and doing nothing to ward it off.
In politics of information, expanding communication systems become more interactive, complex and adaptive. People engage in many more dialogues across new media, rather than submit to top-down, monologue propaganda from ‘superior’ elites. They are more interested in their topics of passion than in the mass media’s trivial disinformation.
TV is a monologue medium, as are radio, print media and non-interactive web pages. You know, all those worthless corporate and bigot propaganda web pages that have no Contact link?
I cannot benefit (nor suffer, more likely) from the interactivity of Learners until you choose to contact me. You may do so from the Contact Page link at the bottom of any chapter of Learners. Let me handle, in the meantime, the feeding frenzy of viruses and spam that swarms to my door, in the hope of welcoming the rare likelihood of some thoughtful Learner’s constructive response. Yours, perhaps? The response that might make worthwhile all my messages in the bottle, otherwise fruitless?
I can use all the help you could send me, battered as I am by witless criticism, criminal negligence and stupid attacks. I've received a few already (desperate or cheerily supportive), for which I am most grateful.
The Greek Agora, Town Hall meetings (unscripted… Gotta add that, now that Bush the Lesser’s disinfo technicians have scripted, rehearsed and packed audiences routinely), telephones and postal or electronic mails are examples of dialogue media.
It is a question of how rapidly the Armchair Formula can be satisfied. Dialogue media can carry at least ten times more useful interactions across the same bandwidth, than monologue media. The sum of useful communication equals real wealth (divided by the sum of useless and/or noxious communications?). I’m talking ten, a hundred, a thousand times more hard cash available to everyone without inflation.
“Your intent is noble, but your appeal misguided. If you talk to these emperors about profits,
and in their love of profit they stop their armies – their armies will rejoice
in peace and delight in profit. Soon
ministers will embrace profit in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace
profit in serving their fathers, younger brothers will embrace profit in
serving their elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned Humanity and
Duty. When these relationships become a
matter of profit, the nation is doomed to ruin.
“But if you talk to these emperors about Humanity and Duty,
and in their love of Humanity and Duty they stop their armies – their armies
will rejoice in peace and delight in Humanity and Duty. Soon ministers will embrace Humanity and Duty
in serving their sovereign, sons will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving
their fathers, younger brothers will embrace Humanity and Duty in serving their
elder brothers – and all of them will have abandoned profit.
"When these relationships become a matter of Humanity
and Duty, then the sovereign is sure to be a true emperor. So why mention profit? Mencius, translated by David Hinton,
Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 219.
(Next quote).
It is up to each of us to create a Virtual Agora of massive political dialog that spans the globe. The World Wide Web is the startup prototype of this Learner Virtual Agora. Insofar it spreads, we’re in luck.
With insignificant outside threats and lots of surplus wealth (very rare), some mature societies would allow Learners to complexify information politics.
As complexity induces more turbulence, it risks bursting the levies of social convention intended to contain and regulate it. Thus, information politicians must renew more and more sophisticated vocabularies and communication habits. Otherwise, the roar of chaotic argument risks to degenerate once again into misinformation politics.
The latest temptation of info elites, to censor the Internet from the top down; and of proletarians, to cripple it from the bottom up (with viruses, hacking, flames, spam and other info litter) is nothing more that the pathetic denial of an ever-expanding information universe. Think of a colicky baby who turns his face away from his strained peas. Bewildered individuals and groups attempt to re-simplify their life by lashing out against the newest complication they consider vulnerable to their abuse. Poor jerks.
In pursuit of abundance, advanced practitioners of disinformation politics tend to disarm unilaterally and thus provoke more military aggression.
Other societies evolved up to information politics, but were destroyed militarily and disappeared from the historic record. Many budding peace societies were annihilated and rendered ‘prehistoric’ because their top-down managers promoted internal wealth and peace, while hungry outsiders hovered nearby: restless, militant and jealous.
We can note this tendency in the United States, where military casualties used to be political poison. This public aversion to military casualties in particular and to militarism in general, tempts aggressive outsiders and internal militarists to inflict more damage. As their assaults grow bolder, better-coordinated and more destructive, survivors revert to politics of misinformation and overt weapon tyranny: tempting options in an overmilitarized world where kneejerk panic trumps rational thought.
Weapon Technology includes the mechanical hardware and flesh-and-blood wetware of warfare: military forces (Weapon technicians), intelligence gatherers, national security agents, secret police, weapons industrialists, weapon workers, their capital plant and enormous inventories of weapons themselves. Today, there is a personal fireharm for every ten inhabitants on Earth, and two or more bullets cast every year for each of them. In case one of those misses.
Weapon Managers discriminate against anyone and anything they can blame for their frequent policy failures (since they are, by definition, the worst peace managers): the poor, women, non-heterosexuals, children, liberals, ethnic/religious minorities, migrants and immigrants, primal myths, human nature and nature itself. Sophisticated weapon managers recruit reactionary candidates from among abused minorities; that way, they can pay lip service to pluralism while they stimulate social abuse.
“The more justly constituted the society, the more admirable
its political form, the more war [weapon mentality] threatens to weaken its
institutions and to pervert them. And it
is also true that the best form of government is that least adapted to the
exigencies of war.” How to Think
about War and Peace, Mortimer J. Adler, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p
42.
Weapon managers get Battle Elites (about a 10% minority among weapon technicians) to do the jackals’ share of their dirty work. Educated officers or enlisted slaves: it doesn’t matter. Half genetically damaged and half the products of childhood neglect/abuse fears, battle elites thrive on both sides of battlefields, riot zones, jailhouse bars and Belsen wire. The remaining 90% of weapon technicians serve as logistics and morale supporters for battle elites on their side, and as easy prey on the other. Finally, as firepower multipliers (artillerists and such) on both sides. Whether in peace or in war, battle elites do the killing and the rest do the dying.
Battle elites cannot bring their aggression under control. This makes them valuable assets on the battlefield and costly nuisances anywhere else. Everybody shares some battle elite traits, though most of us keep ours under strict control. Call it good manners, good taste, conscience, civility, delicacy, decadence or mere cowardice. Most of us are not hard-wired to thrive on the battlefield and in bar fights, the way battle elites are.
I seem to have made a special Karmic vow to someone who must be very influential to me. I’ve promised not to kill or torture anyone, this time around, if I can help it. Incredibly, I’ve pledged this lifetime to PeaceWorld instead. Was I an elite genocide during past incarnations? Most probably. I’m not proud of it, quite the contrary. What a wasted opportunity for fast-buck wickedness and what a rocky row to hoe instead! Indiscriminate killing would be so easy, this time around. There’d be no end to the killing (with seven billion live targets), until everyone had been pitchforked into the meat grinder. Genocide is fantastically well subsidized on this planet—instant gratification for wholehearted marauders.
As for preaching of peace, I wish myself luck before this esteemed assembly. And beg your pardon for this abuse, dear reader, if you already consider yourself to be an honest Learner.
We may split battle elites into two groups:
· The Dirty Dozen: born warriors, gunmen, bullies and social outcasts who often outgrow their aggression with maturity and loving-kindness, properly administered.
· The Himmler Subgroup: primarily civilians, ostensibly good parents, spouses, neighbors and administrators—and quite often, brilliant cowards. Charming and seductive as long as it suits them, they look forward to wreaking havoc on a world of Others they have grown up to despise. They seek to climb the highest rungs of power, from which they may get away with as much mayhem as possible, shielded by their rank.
Just as a shark retains rows of spare teeth in reserve, info proletariats nurture Info Proto-Elites eager to overthrow the current info elite. Proto-elites are a motley crew of ambitious clerks, students and subalterns – employed by authorities or not – but covertly dissenting from them. These frustrated rebels only cohere clumsily, once their elite’s failure rate maxes out.
Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer, analyses Proto-Elite leaders. Unfortunately, he indulges in the sorry habit of biographical reductionism: reducing the complexities of global social movements into a simple inventory of their leaders’ personal idiosyncrasies.
Herodotus treated history and current events as cults of personality, as have many historians and journalists since. Everything happened because some poor slob and his flunkies – officially designated Leaders – made it so exactly in the manner they foresaw.
“By the mid-4th century, there existed a large and well-known
body of Greek literature that had as yet no convenient name―it was not
yet called Historia – but was generally described as the
“writings of the deeds of war” or “inquiries about the deeds of war’ : it
included Herodotus, Thucydides, the several continuations of Thucydides, which
went under the title Hellenica (Affairs of Greece) (only Xenophon’s
survives), and the accounts of the western Greeks by the lost Syracusan writers
Antiochus and Philistus, which went under the title Sicelica (Affairs of
Sicily). It was taken for granted that
this literature was the source of knowledge for anything about war, diplomacy
or interstate relations. P. 85.
“But what of the historians?
The 5th century had bequeathed two major narrative
styles, the linear epic style of Herodotus and the antithetical realistic style
of Thucydides, which were associated with two different views of the world—the
encomiastic Herodotus world of moral achievement and cosmic law versus
Thucydidean pessimism and irony….” Doyne Dawson, The
Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World, Westview
Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1996, p. 95.
Those narratives are about as accurate as the next one that follows. I’m driving my car and in absolute control. So I’m going to flip every car in a hundred-car pileup on a freeway in the fog, into carefully preplanned slots, thus making sure that my car and those that follow, come out the other end without a scratch. Sure, buddy; it could happen!
Yet that would be a rather simple problem, compared to running an entire country. See the leadership section in my chapter “Identity Politics.”
After millennia of crushed dissidence, progressive organizations have been hopelessly Balkanized, which means chopped up, rendered piecemeal and thus relatively harmless. Many social activists worsen their political impotence through mutual ostracism, special interest bickering, petty private grievances and nit-picking ideological puritanism. Thus do much more pragmatic, disciplined and cohesive weapons elites defeat them in detail.
Rejecting holistic transformation, weapon dissidents opt for endless hairsplitting, moral compromise and hopelessness. Indifferent to genuine peace and progress that they believe quite beyond their comprehension and control, they turn into conformist adherents to a ‘loyal opposition.’ Tough luck for those who challenge their turbulent conformism! They are emotionally invested in token resistance against a thriving weapon state that strengthens itself from their feeble resistance.
Recall that body builders push and pull their muscles like taffy against resistance. In roughly the same way, weapon states exploit their weapon dissidence. Thus, the clichéd yammer of weapon dissidents makes their weapon state stronger, more subtle and more difficult to bring down.
On occasion, a breakthrough peace movement manages to dissolve its weapon state. This lopsided relaxation of weapon technology is usually fatal for the society involved, given the presence of well-armed outsiders. So success at peace has never been encouraged in the past. Today’s fashionable ‘community activism’ is a continuation of thousands of years of ineffectual (indeed, inversely effective) weapon dissidence.
My mailbox erupts with rival solicitations for a charitable contribution, each appeal more heart-rending than the last. None asks for more than a check that magically disappears with the promise that it will support some worthy cause, probably with more solicitation mail.
On the other hand, our institutions vacuum fortunes from our wallets to deploy the means, justify the motives and develop the opportunities for mass murder. The beneficiaries of thousands of years of successful propaganda, weapon managers think holistically and plan monolithically. Their international transactions and expenditures are pseudo-voluntary, free spending and largely independent of outside influence.
Just like during World War I, the leadership on both sides has more in common with each other, during their minuet of death, than with their own info proletariat lined up for the next massacre. If we disagree with their goals, we will be marginalized into a political minority both voiceless and trivial (by definition, not by numbers). No matter how many of us there are or how sensible our proposals, thanks to our historical incoherence and hysterical paralysis.
Thanks to thousands of years of defeat, rejection and Balkanization (and the rare, absolutely lethal success), standard-issue weapon dissidents have become divisive, elitist, holier-than-thou, miserly, exclusive, reductive and atomistic. They are satisfied with empty dramatics, ritual bonding in adversity, moralistic self-indulgence and existential despair. Thus do we honor our long tradition of abject defeat. Most of us would rather keep things that way indefinitely. We would rather not alarm ourselves by grabbing real, transformational power. The prospect scares me, too. So what? As if we had any other choice but successful transformation, at this stage in history.
Thus – every hour on the hour – the media announce fresh weapon triumphs and peace tragedies. Progressives cannot hope to navigate the political mainstream until they’ve rallied around a hyper-complex platform of inclusive, cooperative and mutualistic reforms. In other words, until they’ve maximized Learning planet-wide.
Some text – this one or another, perhaps better? – may catapult to world power its international, interdenominational and interethnic adherents of every age, sex and class. This could happen much more readily than you might think. Like other hidden truths, it is just a question of time and numbers: the time it would take to spread understanding and the number of those who’ve understood.
Like a vampire caught out in daylight, weapon mentality cannot survive full exposure to the truth.
This transition could be as unforeseen, swift and exhaustive as the U.S.S.R.’s perestroika. Every modern-day leader – suddenly rendered powerless, clueless and numb by the collapse of inexhaustible energy sources and/or orthodox power structures – could abandon his office spontaneously and simultaneously. In the absence of an organizational framework like Learners, this transition could become horribly destructive—simply put, the mafia will take over the world, and the worst political horrors will roll out like clockwork. Sound like current events?
Many independent ideologues and anonymous polemicists are hard at work at this task, each one bringing different insights and talents to bear. But it is almost impossible for us to broadcast our findings—especially among weapon dissidents. Paradoxically, they are more closed to new ideas than weapon managers who will adopt novel improvements (reluctantly, but assuredly) into their robust and self-confident management schemes. The shaky ground progressives must negotiate does not permit them this kind of open-mindedness, at least until they change their mind. May dissidents experience a change of mind and allow our best ideas to be heard, seriously meditated and rebroadcast! Unlike current events.
As our civilization polarizes between luxuriant minorities and restless majorities, as reason and rights fade from public discourse, raw greed becomes the final arbiter of more and more new policy. But even shifty greed must find its rightful place. Well-regulated Cooperatives of Plenty shall welcome private enterprise – that wellspring of innovation and abundance – provided every citizen gains the same basic benefits thereunder.
Despite their inflated privileges, info elites are just as vulnerable to mistaken information – both self-inflicted and out-sourced – as are info proletarians. In order to guarantee dependable benefits for themselves and their dearest (as opposed to rickety perks they must defend at gunpoint), information elites must find new ways to generate sustainable abundance, and ‘adopt harmless rituals that redirect fearful aggression, destructive diligence and the most harmful ideas.
Among the tools info elites use to organize their partisans, greed is second only to fear. Learners won’t tempt info elites to abandon their Conspiracies of Greed until our shared vocabulary and purpose outsmart hysterical avarice. Learner doctrine must be clear, concise and immune to prejudice, cupidity and panic. There must be a plan or a series of plans for which most people would volunteer because they saw a better chance to benefit cooperatively (or merely survive) within the plan, regardless of their origin and status.
The belief is obsolete that people can be punished into better behavior. The more penalties, beyond the necessary minimum, the more resistance—automatically. Weapon managers are the only ones who could profit from this tailspin of coercion and defiance.
“… The primitive wisely knows that the
wealthy man is not the one who accumulates surplus but the one who gives it
away, that to be rich is to divest oneself of riches. This
wisdom becomes difficult to sustain in the context of Neolithic stock keeping
and agricultural surpluses; with the devising of metal coinage in the cities,
however, we are in danger of losing it altogether. Can
hard currency, being noncorruptible, perhaps be safely hoarded without
corrupting its possessor, unlike the shit from which it has symbolically
evolved? Can a hardened culture thus outwit its lowly
origins and the limitations they propose?
“Probably not. The original heap of
stones piously proclaims the hope that by gathering together we may build
something durably human. When it is superseded by a
heap of golden coins secreted in the rich man’s treasury, culture is almost
certainly in trouble. The heap of golden coins is a
frozen swarm, unmoving; the rich man, though apparently post-magical, will be
tempted to fetichize this swarm, secretly to believe that his possession of it
has alchemically transformed him from human baseness into imperishable purity
that will live forever – in which case he will have by-passed the bowel … Thus
the worship of filthy lucre is not, as many suppose, the worship of shit but
its denial; and a denial of such fundamental realities will ultimately poison
everything in its attempt to find utterance. Not only is it clear that hoarded
coin sooner or later does rot the soul (just as retained feces and fetuses rot
the body) but a money-worshipping culture forsakes the chief virtue that flows
from gift-exchange: its magical capacity to restrain greed and forestall war.” Taken from The Origins of the Sacred: the Ecstasies
of Love and War, by Dudley Young, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 207.
Peace Mentality sustains our souls. Like a spiritual physicist, Mahatma Gandhi revealed that its nucleus was the fusion of Truth and Non-violence. Our souls sparkle around this nucleus, like electrons around a vast atom. Every moment of every day, a still, small voice whispers to us, “Love fearlessly.” Tirelessly, from across the cosmic void, it repeats itself at celestial amplitude. We have but to listen and obey.
Even though peace mentality burns bright in idealistic young minds, it gutters out in middle age and is soon extinguished in many unlucky souls. Almost everyone would pick peace mentality over the weapon variety on an even playing field. However, our opportunities for peace are as fleeting as our weapon practices are diverse, forceful and tempting. Given so much negative conditioning, only an enlightened few manage to become able practitioners of peace.
Peace technology pays its own freight and that of weapon technology. Despite the countless setbacks imposed because of weapon priorities, peace mentality inches forward; it transcends life and death—much less the shameless narcissism of disinformation politics.
Peace Technology includes:
· our flight from misery (above and beyond any “Constitutional” pursuit of happiness);
· our run at abundance, health, human rights and sustainable agriculture;
· our worship of nature and supernature;
· our quest for learning: play, entertainment and enlightenment;
· our pursuit of:
o
Peace
enforcement,
o
Sound
philosophy,
o
Valid
enterprise and
o
Useful
professionalism, as well as other life-giving activities.
Without such exemplary modifiers (in italics), we needn’t consider these things essentially valuable. After all, they easily revert to organized bullying, wordy nonsense, greed satiation and naked elitism: giveaway symptoms of weapon mentality.
Peace mentality has one Categorical Imperative: raise the children well. Everything else takes back seat to this effort or impedes it. They say, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Raising healthy children requires every adult’s cooperation. The goal is not to raise many children indifferently, that is a weapon requirement. Peace management would demand that every child be cocooned in optimal surroundings. Their health and Learning should take absolute priority, as would the civil rights of their mothers.
“Young children all know love for their parents. And when they grow up, they all know respect
for their elders. Loving parents is
Humanity, and respecting elders is Duty.
That’s the secret. Just extend it
throughout all beneath Heaven.” Mencius,
translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 240. Bibliography
It seems obvious that all social good flows from cherished children maturing into good citizens. Logically, we could conclude that the opposite is also true: that bad citizens proliferate when more children are abused. At gut level, we delight in children’s happiness, suffer heartache when they come to harm, and sigh intense relief when they are delivered therefrom. One needn’t be a parent to feel these things, nor particularly sensitive.
If you believed in reincarnation, you would have to be crazy to support any social habit that did not pamper every child without exception—you’d be signing your own torture warrant during future incarnations. Totally bonkers… Another reason to make belief in reincarnation universal.
Those who resist this empathy are deeply disturbed; so is our whole society, since it flouts this elemental truth. We let children perish by the millions, let billions more become stupid adults through malnutrition and neglect.
We should make good these deadly scandals, and that quickly. This travesty would be unthinkable on PeaceWorld―unheard of. It would cause government meltdown, trigger a complete overhaul of leadership. Ex-leaders would withdraw in disgrace from public service, paralyzed with shame. Fat chance that current weapon-leaders would live up to such peaceful ideals. The best of them might, under ideal circumstances. Once we’ve convinced ourselves, they must be likewise convinced or replaced.
An amusing political homily drones like Muzak in my mind. Humans cleave to three broad categories of political behavior. Regardless of other allegiances, we fit in among Ex-Herbivores, Ex-Carnivores and Omnivores (oft-reincarnated herbivores and carnivores who have learnt the futility of their old ways).
Ex-Herbivore: “Hey, there’s plenty of good grazing out here. Grass ain’t brain food, so let’s just make lots of babies and munch away―what we do best.
"We live in the present. If we got an itch, we scratch it. Our universe is in that scratching. Anything more―that’s just too complicated for us.
“Gee, our carnivores are pretty nasty. They hunt us, kill us and eat us. But they do chase off other carnivores who might be worse. Who knows; things could be worse. Anything that really scares us, well, our blind stampede will make it disappear, won't it? Why bother to vote? We just want to be happeeeee.”
Ex-Carnivore: “Behold this beautiful body of mine: powerful, lean and hungry. My mind ticks over, deadly and remorseless. I live in the future, when my darkest needs will at last be satisfied.
“I am an expert at magical thinking. As long as I carry out a precise series of steps in exactly the correct order and with perfect timing, I may feast to perfection and indefinitely (which must be paradise and proof of my selection as God’s favorite). No one may stop me, and I will kill anyone who tries. If I fail, it is through lack of self-perfection. It doesn’t matter how many times this recurs; I must succeed in the end or die trying.
“This obsessive-compulsion can be carried out by a lion during his hunt, a hierarch during his cult devotion (bloody or otherwise), a tycoon during his stock market transactions, a science doctrinaire during his laboratory tricks or an author ruminating his prose. My results have been more or less similar in terms of satisfaction, and I have reincarnated in all these spheres of action and more of the same nature. My universe is centered on the repeated sacrifice of prey and my self-perfection in so doing. Nothing else matters, and neither God nor I need have any mercy on anyone less obsessed.
“My sires taught me to use this money, these fancy institutions and novel gadgets to satisfy my hunger. Anyone slower, weaker and more ethical than me is fair game. Anything I can claw down is my sacred property, to dispose of as I please. If I don’t claim it, some hungrier carnivore will.
"End of discussion, time to pursue happiness.
“I know! Let's run for Congress!”
Omnivore: “Salads are fine in their place. My peers and I can neutralize any piddling carnivore at will. It’s fun―plus it's good eats!
“We coordinate the past, the present and the future to improve our odds of personal happiness. We’re not so much interested in everyone else's pursuit of happiness—that’s their business. We are interested in accelerating their flight from misery: a political duty that carnivores keep forgetting in their wild pursuit of personal happiness.
“Through natural selection, we have evolved to learn. The more complex our information universe, the more we owe it our wealth. This wealth could serve to distract ex-herbivores and divert ex-carnivores until they’ve grasped the fundamentals of Learner civilization.
“After five thousand years of bloody compromise, we’re just hitting our stride, and that’s exciting! This information potlatch promises to supplant the rigors of the stalk and the rights of spring. Everyone merits abundance and security… The best, most obvious way to secure our own.
“You, fated ex-herbivore bereft of imagination! Look up beyond your cud. Hey, you, shifty ex-carnivore! Your aggression betrays your weakness. Go ahead, take a lunge at your next charge. It will fail, sooner or later, as it always has.
Both of you! Join us in peace!”
But this is mere EZ listening. Learners shall take a much closer look at the physiology of social behavior and public responsibility, discover better models and clearer explanations of human motivation.
“Paul MacLean tells us, ‘We are the possessors of a triune
brain – not one brain but three, each with its own way of perceiving and
responding to the world.’ Richard M. Restak, The
Brain: The Last Frontier (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). In ascending order on the phylogenic scale,
they are: (1) reptilian (central core), (2) paleomammalian (limbic system), and
(3) neomammalian (cerebral cortex).
The first of these, the reptilian, is the most primitive; MacLean has
also labeled this the “R-complex.” It is comparable to
much of the brain found in [fish and] reptiles.
And it includes the hypothalamus.
Surrounding the reptilian R-complex is the next level, the limbic system
which is associated with the brain found in early mammals...
“In effect, we appear to have been ‘pre-wired,’ at least
partially, by the reptilian brain to be ritualistic, to be in awe of authority,
to develop social pecking orders, and perhaps even to develop
obsessive-compulsive neuroses ...
“We appear to have been pre-wired in the case of the limbic
system as well, to respond emotionally to threats to self- or
species-preservation …”
Dennis J. D. Sandole, “The Biological Basis of Needs,” Conflict:
Human Needs Theory, John Burton, ed., 1990, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1990, p.
71.
Of course, the scientific community has done its best to neutralize this theory, stating that non-mammals have other brain structures that serve similar functions. They cite cephalopods and birds (but not reptiles) that display surprisingly advanced brains capacities. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=one-world-many-minds. But this theory remains quite useful to illustrate the mental priorities in different kinds of humans.
Once our models of human awareness improve, better estimates of human motivation and better treatments for violence-, greed- and fear-driven deviants will help us love one another fearlessly—at last!
Debra Niehoff reviews criminal correction in her mindful book, The Biology of Violence, The Free Press, New York, 1999, “Picking Up the Pieces”. Herself the victim of a violent crime (as I have been, at gunpoint; and as you quite likely have been in this sorry day and age, just like all the past ones), she downplays violence as a criminal deterrent and suggests more thoughtful methods of behavior modification. Her research reveals that police terror and penal brutality do not so much suppress criminality as increase it. This is a constant striving of weapon mentality: to increase criminality and aggression.
We live on a man-ruled WeaponWorld bereft of God’s Peace, mutual welcome and care. Could we be here to remake this planet into God’s own PeaceWorld, filled with them? The God I believe in loves Peace and abhors War among the children. God will reward faithful Learners eager for Peace, as genuine offspring and true saints. That reward will translate into miracles.
Let’s say you were neither an atheist nor devout – unlike most of them, neither doctrinaire nor closed-minded – and sought to prove the existence of God solely for your satisfaction. There would be no better way to do it, than to rebuild WeaponWorld into PeaceWorld and witness God’s self-confirmation by showering us with miracles of approbation. After all, we would be doing what God had always taught us to do, instead of what God forbade – despite the aberrant commands of thousands of years of weapon fundamentalists and ideological liars: “Kill, lie, rob your neighbor and despise him, pray in public. We order you to obey the commandments of mere men and practice that which God has forbidden.”
Those miracles would be God’s substitute for our perfectly scientific, perfectly orthodox, perfectly serial disasters. We could pour into PeaceWorld all the sanctity we had pent up in our hearts, and benefit from miracles of wisdom, kindness and love. Every Learner could become a brother and sister on PeaceWorld―so much so that we could hardly imagine it.
It would be like acting our part in a play, except that all the props, costumes and lighting would conform more closely to Peace and improve with time. Furthermore, the play’s director, writers, cast, producers, sponsors and audience had changed their mind – that WeaponWorld was not so hot – and that we’d be better off on PeaceWorld.
Every Learner could assume – with greater zest, charity and fellow feeling; more easily, happily, cheaply and safely; suffering from a lot less fear; using exponentially greater artistry, passion and devotion – the bearing of God’s massed saints: athirst, drunk and fulfilled with the Peace of God. Until God secured His Peace.
We are all Learners, from birth to death. As political, moral, spiritual, pragmatic human beings, bonded in love and in family with everyone else – for better or for worse – we are the Chosen Ones in this space-time continuum. Of God, of Allah, of Fate or of Nothing? Whatever you choose to call it. I call it God, and us, God’s, which includes everything above, below, in between and nowhere. Does that bother you? Why?
Instead, we have chosen to dawdle as WeaponWorld slaves. Caught up in a tap dance of perpetual war and ephemeral peace, we improvise as we go along, paying homage to two opposite sets of values: weapon mentality and peace mentality. Suffering from this mass schizophrenia and hostage to it, we have become nothing more that asocial sheep and incompetent wolves … God’s spoiled children, instead of God’s saints.
What an inexcusable waste!
Everyone has his own trip, right? You’ve got yours, I’ve mine, each and every one has theirs : each one a carefully crafted, custom job, for better or worse. Hitler and his henchmen had theirs, too. Some new tyrant might smash ours like docked yachts in a hurricane. History has warned us.
Haven't we grown cagey enough to recognize the worst gangsters and shut them down? Don't we have all the creeps of history to compare them against? Is there anything new they could try, that we couldn’t read through?
Learners will tap into everything known. That will make them smarter. Smarter people, fewer mistakes; fewer mistakes, less pain; less human pain, greater productivity. A quick investment for unlimited profits. Could we have enough Humanity and Duty, per Mencius, to see this through? Have we got the guts to attempt what I’m suggesting? Where could we find the guts; in the faith that our souls are saved in Jesus, perhaps?
Could it be we’ve grown too cagey for our own good? Today, we find it easier to believe in nothing—to trust in no new ideology, whatever the cost. Fanaticophobia is such a sorry custom. “The opposite of illusions is not disillusion but the truth.” A Course in Miracles, Foundation for Inner Peace, p. 438.
So here’s my agenda, in clear and simple, for your consideration.
First Things
First! World Peace First!
I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for decades, now; so far unheard, drowning in the meanders of denial.
You may have noticed three things happening all at once, for the first time in history.
· There’s a truly global communication network out there. Instead of a conglomeration of alien and alienating nation-states, we are fast becoming One World. Me Tarzan, swing my message along the jungle vines of this World Wide Web, to get it out to you.
· Like-minded Learners throng this planet. Regardless of provenance, religion and ideology, each of us craves peace. Exquisitely trained and ready for anything, we outnumber the tyrants and their accomplices by thousands to one.
· Finally, we’re teetering on a cliff-edge of omnicide ("Kill everything!") that’s nearing more scary every day.
Why not exploit this cracked-open, triple-pane window of opportunity, recruits and crisis? It was sealed shut in the past, since essential peace components were missing. Every prior effort at peace was doomed to fail in their absence; and it did so often that we have convinced ourselves that all such efforts are useless, with or without those essential components. That window of opportunity will close, once again, when the evil twin weapon components of those peace efforts execute their final mission. We only have this current, fleeting opportunity before the final curtain comes down.
In order to exploit it, we will need to share one ideal and organize our creativity around it. An ideal not on the tip of everyone’s tongue, yet adoptable after their careful consideration. One that embraces the best and worst of who we are; that would brace us to fear, exclude and censor nothing and no one. It would shield us from ice storms of recrimination, blame games, aggression and untruth. Finally, it would allow us to forgive everyone and everything, including ourselves and the worst we’ve done in the past—as cultures, religions and individuals.
Allow us to forgive ourselves, repent for our unholy ways and make honest amends? Could we find what it takes? Could we wrap our minds around that?
Learners will call that high ideal “PeaceWorld.”
For the first time, we have every means, motive and opportunity to make it happen. Once begun, the volume of our peace song may drown out the bad brass band blare of WeaponWorld.
Quotes from:
http://sunsite.org.uk/packages/Online-Book-Initiative/Adolph.Hitler/unpacked/mkv1ch04.html.
[Author’s note: a neutral academic web page, now
offline. I’d rather not refer you to an alternative,
pro-Nazi one. My family fought the Nazis
tooth and nail. I despise them. But this is WeaponWorld and I must harvest my
quotes where I can find them. Your
reading of Learners will require a broadened outlook on your
part].
“In every case where there are exigencies or tasks that seem
impossible to deal with successfully, public opinion must be concentrated on
the one problem ... Only in this way can
public interest be aroused to such a pitch as will urge people to combine in a
great voluntary effort and achieve important results.
“This fundamental truth applies also to the individual ...
He must always concentrate his efforts to one definitely limited stage of his
progress, which has to be completed before the next step be attempted … This systematic
way of approaching an objective is an art in itself and always calls for the
expenditure of every ounce of energy...”
Hitler, Adolph, Mein Kampf, Vol. I,
Chap. 10.
“… all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare
essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped
formulas. These slogans should be
repeated persistently until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea
that has been put forward.” Vol. I, Chap. 6.
“The more the militant energies of the people are directed
towards one objective, the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted
by the magnetism of its unified actions, ...”
Vol. I, Chap. 3.
“Any Weltanschauung, though a thousandfold right and
supremely beneficial to humanity, will be of no practical service for the
maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become the
rallying point of a militant movement.”
Vol. II, Chap. 1.
Shouldn’t America remain a political lighthouse for the rest of the world? Or must it devolve so stupidly into the world’s latest bully Centurion? Why not nourish and pamper that legendary idealism, and transplant it into the fallow loam of the Old World, for permanent cultivation? All the Old World has managed to cultivate, up to now, have been the weeds weapon mentality.
America has always served as a pragmatic test bed for lofty new ideals. Its citizens have taken the most radical, most risky ideologies and transformed them into pragmatic working models of downstream abundance. Across the world, idealists, entrepreneurs and common folk alike have fallen in love with our splendid results and beaten a path to our door. That’s what we have been most admired for and what we’re best at.
Yet, when we start mimicking worn-out tyrants from the Old World, its wary residents begrudge us our second-hand despotism and strike back hard. With good reason—those gladiator-movie clichés never worked in thousands of years of bloody trial and error, as everyone knows perfectly well.
It’s time we cultivated PeaceWorld: our one true calling. Every other alternative is mere death by the sword.
“To these three forms of law, a fourth one links up, the
most important of all. It isn’t engraved
in marble or in bronze, but in citizens’ hearts. It is the real constitution of the State,
which grows stronger every day; when other laws grow old or expire, it revives
and replaces them. It sustains the
people in the spirit of their institution; it substitutes, unawares, the force
of habit for that of authority. I speak
of morals, customs and especially opinion: that overlooked part of our
politics, but upon which all the rest depends; that part which preoccupies the
great statesman in secret, while he seems to focus on personal
regulations. Those are but the girdle of
the dome, of which morals – born more slowly – end up forming the unshakable
key.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, (The Social Contract). Book II, Chapter 11.
I may try to invite you into PeaceWorld, but can’t cram you inside. All I can do is suggest the melody and trust that you will choose join the harmony. Everybody sing!
What PeaceWorld may repay us is immaterial—no matter how much we may long to bask in its glory. Our conscience somewhat revived at last, the glory of our favorite God, reverence for long-dead ancestors, the welfare of our posterity and our military honor as true guarantors of Peace, all demand it of us.
That should be enough.
Every child is subject to aversion training against peace. As a result, we grownups refuse to sort our information politics into their weapons and peace components, and reject world peace in our lifetime.
I cut correspondence short with a so-called "progressive" who concluded, quite pleased with himself, that World Peace would never happen until at least forty years from now: the time it would take to eliminate his responsibility for it, since he would be retired or dead by then. According to him, people are just not ready for it; they're not graced with the superior morality he is obviously endowed with…
I won’t name him, out of mercy. After all, his is a general malpractice, not an exceptional one. In most cases, these days, the responsible party is not named, for fear of his reprisal or that of his supporters. The moment the weakest party would be harmed, Learners should mercilessly call out the responsible party by name, regardless of the consequences, as long as those weakest were shielded from further harm.
In a PeaceWorld Agora, infinitely more elegant than WeaponWorld, anyone responsible for human suffering would be stripped of power. Guilt and regret for one’s misdeeds should become a preventive measure—no matter how much that might cost in the meantime. The current practice of disguising one’s failures in anonymity should be forbidden, as much on the Internet as during institutional misdeeds.
For example, the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the brave journalist who served as the steadfast conscience of the Russian State – whatever the cost – should be laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin whose birthday was the day of her murder, and of his murderous crony, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Russian Chechen State.
The following human rights workers, poets, journalists, lawyers and judges have been murdered in Russia, most without serious investigation or follow-up arrest.
· Nadezhda Chaikova, 1996
· Galina Starovoitova, 1998
· Igor Domnikov, 2000
·
Yury Shchekochikhin, 2003
· Paul Klebnikov, 2004
· Ivan Safronov, 2007
· Magomed Yvloyev, 2009
· Vyachsla Yaroshenko, 2009
· Stanislav Markelov, 2009
· Anastasia Babourova, 2009
· Natalia Estemirova, 2009
· Serguei Magnitsky, 2009
· Edouard Tchouvachov, 2010
· Rouslan Akhtakhanov, 2011
Many more state-sponsored murders have gone unnoticed by the Western Press. Russia won’t regain its slava (glory) until it starts protecting their replacements as deliberately as it sacrificed impulsively those listed.
Dispatching those national treasures and discouraging their imitators by acts of sheer terror would be unthinkable for legitimate leaders of these states. On PeaceWorld, this disgrace would have thrown them out of office without appeal. Yet on WeaponWorld, they thrive from their inconceivable transgressions. They are not alone on WeaponWorld, on the contrary. Almost every current ruler would lose his war crime trial before the World Court.
Compared to most of those I've reached out to, this guy was rather optimistic about the prospect of world peace. Here is how this planet’s sad burden of weapon stalwarts sorts itself: an overwhelming majority which asserts that world peace is impossible, worthless and evil; and a handful that maintains it might be worthwhile but quite unlikely in the near future, when they would be personally responsible for it. Let someone else do the work!
How convenient for him babbling his platitudes! Needless to say, he wouldn’t lift a finger to help me in the meantime. Neither he nor his cohort of do-nothing ‘progressives’, good for nothing but wringing their hands and whining about how nasty people and current events are.
Take your time, Bubba: the next forty years or the last five thousand; your results will be the same in any case. Weapon mentality will always prevail at the expense of you and your progressive hopes, because you will never step forward to champion peace, despite all your fine talk.
World peace will break out, one way or another. Either our military insanity will kill most of us off and a few survivors will default to peace, or Learners will rally and make it happen judiciously: by design, voluntarily and soon.
Reactionaries won’t touch this topic because it betrays their primary motive and motivator of others: fear. Fashionable progressives (equally fear struck) dismiss this topic as talked to death and thus neatly support the reactionaries—despite all their fine talk.
This text studies the mentalities of weapons and peace as if they were discrete, coherent and self-willed entities (memeplexes). Their schemes contend, grow strong or weak over time and influence mass thought. Peace and weapon mentors are spokespeople for invisible but potent forces. Their actions, words and beliefs are constructive and destructive reflections of the collective superconscience. A few more thought-constructs may help us clarify this concept.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke of the general will, which prescribes the greatest common good for all: the sole legitimation of government. Under the general will, everyone could restrict their personal will, yet still come out ahead in the long run, since that is what it does best.
For Western philosophers, it grows from the bottom up: from the individual to the heights of government power. The Chinese and their oriental disciples talk about the “Mandate of Heaven” prescribed by Confucius (Kong Fuzi, K'ung-fu-tzu), which alone renders legitimacy to government by virtue of its ritual harmony with cosmic law. It grows from the top down into individual depths.
Each is considered mandatory for good governance by its supporters. I suspect that they are basically identical. Cosmic law, government authority and individual freedom: all three would have optimal frequencies that harmonized best with the others. Detune this optimal resonance at any of the three levels and suffer corresponding disaster as the system shook itself apart. Without the general will, we would sink into chaos; without government power, things would fall apart, à la Democratic Republic of the Congo; without the Mandate of Heaven, mass rebellion would become mandatory.
The central tuning fork of this harmonic system would be government.
Freud spoke brilliantly of the subconscious. Personally, I am unaware of it (just kidding). Nowadays, everyone realizes they are fitted out with a set of subconscious impulses.
Carl Gustav Jung talked about the collective unconscious from which spring strangely consistent archetypes and synchronous phenomena. Every culture reveres its own recollection of spooky super-coincidences. Jung said the collective unconscious contains the sum of every forgotten thought and all of those in the future. Meanwhile each conscious mind holds a careful selection of current thought. Or receives and converts it like a fine-tuned antenna?
Might some psychotics have their antennae tuned to slightly different frequencies? Could this be why primal societies valued instead of marginalizing them, the way we do today? Because they were tuned to alien FM stations instead of AM reactionary talk shows, and their outlandish output could turn out to be handy in a pinch?
Where do these ideas come from? I submit that the Collective Superconscience distributes them.
The collective unconscious would be more like a storage battery: transitory and mutable, limited by pinched modes of thought and human geographies. Whereas the collective superconscience would act more like a fluid (a magneto-hydrodynamic plasma?) circuit board that operates in parallel with human communities, and diagrams the flow, accumulation and dispersal of their currents—burning out certain circuits and allowing others to propagate in size and complexity.
Let’s hope our few peace circuits multiply and intertwine luxuriantly, and our many weapons circuits, short out without effect. I believe in miracles at the hands of our Loving God. The rest is up to us.
Emile Durkheim evoked the collective conscience as an intangible social framework from which criminals stray, rather like the out-of-bounds lines of a ball game. These transgressions (“How could he do that!”) reinforce normative rules most of us live by, that bind us more closely together.
World peace could grow up in this manner.
Noam Chomsky proposed a Universal Grammar: that we are hard-wired, somehow, with language skills. Just don’t use this text as an example! Jung talked about racial memory: the ability of a people to retain facts about its past. Hinduism and other religions mention akasha: a universal etheric field that imprints a record of past events, per The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Elizabeth Knowles, Ed., Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 17.
I am just skimming these topics; humanity has barely scratched their surface and forgotten what it knew about them in the past. Future Learners will study them in depth. There is a fantastic potential here. Scientific breakthroughs might eclipse everything we’ve discovered up to now: vaccines for our cultural ailments and shortcuts through our technological labyrinths.
Other researchers study morphic fields that bathe living tissue in auras, rather like those captured by Kirlian photography. Morphic fields might explain the peculiar way germ plasm achieves unlikely symmetry and blueprint speciation.
During billions of years, chemical reactions frothed in a primordial stew of organic molecules transfixed by lightning bolts. From this shocked broth emerged entities more and more complex until, eons later, the sea bottom was littered with—player pianos! Imagine how much simpler this scenario would be, compared to the evolution of life. I can’t recall the author of this anecdote (J.B.S. Haldane?). His example involved IBM Selectric typewriters: splendid tools, soon to be forgotten. But this illustration fits in too well here to pass up—even without proper attribution.
Without these morphic fields, the dominant life form on Earth might have been a fifteen-foot layer (so sunlight could shine through it) of translucent slime wrapped around the globe. Such a layer might not have left any trace after its disappearance and might have lived for eons on Earth (intermittently or continuously), without our noticing.
Something else promotes a far richer, more mobile and adaptive diversity within a finite toolkit of inheritable traits. After all, slime mold and humans share the same four DNA nucleotides and 64 codons formed from them, whose shifting patterns and assembly codes distinguish every Self from every Other.
Some unknown field must cloak every organism―keep it alive, whole and distinct from the rest of the world, yet that attach it, and us, to the world in profound ways.
The greatest Jewish Learner of the Kabbala was
called Isaac Luria, (Yitzhak Lurya יִצְחַק
לוּרְיָא, Yitzhak Ben Shlomo
Ashkenazi, and Yitzhak Ashkenazi. He is
also known as Ari אֲרִי
and He-Ari ("The
Lion") from the acronym for Ashkenazi Rabbi Itzhak
("The Ashekanic Rabbi Yitzhak"), thus
Arizal with "ZaL" being the acronym for Zikhrono Livrakha ("of
blessed memory" or literally "let the memory of him be for a
blessing"), a common Jewish honorific for the deceased, and known as Ari
Ha-Kadosh ("Ari the Holy"). I
name him so completely for two reasons: 1) in honor of his humble genius ; and 2) so that search engines point those
interested in him to this text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Luria
Translating on behalf of Learners in the most simplistic terms I can manage, Luria posited the principle that God created the Universe by making room for it outside of His Perfection, somewhat the way a man would inhale sharply to make room for someone passing him down a narrow corridor.
According to Luria, some kind of trauma took place during this transition, which induced the dichotomy between worldly good and evil. The Divine Light that had formerly filled all things, flowed from Adam’s eyes, nose and mouth: a Light the material world could not handle. Three upper vessels of the Universe cracked and seven lower vessels shattered in a shower of Holy Sparks. Those elements that resisted this shattering became Evil, while those that took part remained Good.
I believe that the conflict between good and evil is a fusion reactor that powers the material Universe and the DNA of life that’s perched in it. No good and evil, no power from their conflict, absolute zero everywhere. Which may be the point of the exercise?
According to him, every time another human being obeys a commandment of God, he ‘repairs the world’ and raises another spark from the depths of evil to the heights of good. Jewish ritual life is intended to raise the utmost good, no matter how trivial the act of obedience. Correspondingly, any deviation from the commandment of God drops another Spark to lower levels. In this way, the practicing Jew carries out an existential struggle equivalent to the myth of Sisyphus, bearing Holy Sparks upwards to the Light despite a cascade of downward ones showering on him and his burden. And God has a cosmic need for humanity to restore His Holy Order.
What might that mean for the rest of us? That we should obey the commandments we understand best from any God of our choosing, to restore the Holy Sparks of God to their proper place. The foremost among them, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you;” including, among its subsets, “Thou shalt not kill;” and governing every religious law we know – be it from an honest Pagan, Kantian, agnostic or atheist – would best be served by working hard for World Peace.
http://www.pasarel.org/main/kabbalah/kabbalah.htm
http://www.wordtrade.com/religion/judaism/kabbalahR.htm
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, in Secrets of the Soil: New Age Solutions for Restoring our Planet, Harper Collins & Row, 1989, assert they’ve discovered devas. These devas identified themselves as spirit architects of various plant, animal and other living communities—in other words, communicating forms of the morphic field we are talking about.
New-Age naturalists admit to having communicated with them, at Findhorn and elsewhere. By their account, more and more abused by humanity, these devas have withdrawn to their last brambles of wilderness to await our mechanized self-destruction. Apparently, they would rather communicate with sensitive naturalists among us and rebuild a mutual framework of understanding and cooperation; the one we’ve spent the last few thousand years trying to rip out.
This, provided we reciprocated with love. Love, in this context, means pragmatic care, empathy and forethought at which our species excels; not the vapid sentimentality, reductive positivism and dogmatic hypocrisy we mistake for the real McCoy these days.
Forswearing the devil’s bargain of near-term abuse and long-term annihilation, Learner and deva mutualists might form a stronger partnership. Let’s assume we chose to heed them and follow their best-practice advice. Peace technology Genetic Architecture could generate unheard-of abundance while avoiding transgenic catastrophes and unintended consequences. Otherwise, if Genetic Engineers persist with their double blind fumblings, they will merely spawn deadlier weapon technologies and ‘unavoidable’ disasters as their fallout. The omnicide that threatens to engulf us will become inevitable.
Rupert Sheldrake sails fearlessly beyond this thought horizon. In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature and A New Science of Life: the Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance he postulates the existence of morphic resonances. Among other things, they make it easier to do whatever has already been accomplished.
For example, randomly
selected students find it easier to solve crossword puzzles the day after
they have been published in newspapers and many other people have solved
them. The same students take
significantly longer to solve the same kinds of puzzles before the public
gets to see them. Unpublished control
puzzles are no simpler or harder to solve over time.
Or just recall the four-minute mile: a routine accomplishment among Olympic runners these days, though once thought impossible.
I am pretty sure the writing of this text (especially in French) became easier for me – indirectly – as strangers read it and noticed my errors, even though they never told me about them. I am persuaded that our delicate minds are bundled in mysterious and imperceptible assemblies.
In short, good habits become easier to accomplish after they’ve been practiced elsewhere—and bad habits, more difficult to abandon, the longer and more often they’d been indulged in.
Up ‘til now, humanity has practiced obsessive-compulsive warfare; from now on, we must practice an equivalent peace. Willing co-conspirators with WeaponWorld, we’ve bleached the term “world peace” of its emotive power, let weapon mentors cheapen it into the punch line of a stale joke. From now on, we should turn warfare into a topic of sick jokes and wage peace in deadly earnest.
As another example, periodic solar flares kindle auroras in polar skies; sometimes they fry electrical grids and satellites, curdle the albumin in our blood and turn passive crowds into angry mobs. One cannot escape their effect except sixty feet or more below ground. Collate the dates of solar flare maxima on Earth and outbreaks of mass violence; you may find a correspondence for yourself.
What appears to be the ‘undifferentiated vacuum of space’ through which our solar system drifts, is actually a pea soup fog of subatomic particles/wavicles precisely attuned to the minute disturbances of distant celestial objects: electromagnetic, gravitational and no doubt more subtle emissions we haven’t registered yet. This varying mix and quantum flux of space-time and beyond, reaches down through our protective atmosphere and planetary magnetic shielding, and has crafty effects on our thoughts and behavior.
Five thousand years of astrologers have barely scratched the surface of those effects. For three hundred years, astrophysicists haven’t even bothered to notice them. Such intellectual sloth disguised as ‘the scientific method!’
It was not for nothing that Newton burned out like a candle during the last few years of his life. He was trying to reformulate astrology into a rigorous mathematical science—minus half the planets, many asteroids, etc., undiscovered until after his death. A hero’s project worth dying for, even if left unfulfilled. Likewise, Johann Kepler and a succession of equivalent geniuses lost in the depths of time. This mathematical guideline would have eclipsed mere Newtonian physics and cubed the value of their legacy. It could become accessible to Learners the moment we devoted enough time and scientific attention to it.
Just as genetic adaptation and human myths sway to unfelt breezes, so I believe we interact with ethical fields that surround us, even (especially!) when we refuse to notice them. Often, these fields corrupt entire peoples, tempt elites into perilous self-indulgence and terrorize those few who choose to resist them.
This took place in Assyria, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda and around your nearest mass grave site (you’d be surprised how nearby to you). Monstrous misdeeds – unthinkable in other circumstances – became the norm. At other times, public compassion and grace propelled entire nations to greater heights of social complexity.
We may be lucky and clever enough to witness a new wave of global enlightenment. God knows, we’ve witnessed a glut of the bloodier kind: enough to kill or sicken everyone involved.
All these trends are visible effects of the collective superconscience. We have chosen to let these invisible forces stampede us where they will, and declared them nonexistent by popular will. If we were slightly smarter, we would search them out fearlessly, cultivate the most useful ones and redirect the worst along their least toxic axes. This topic is just beginning to be studied under the title Noetics. See Rupert Sheldrake, above and elsewhere.
Finally, this text invokes PeaceWorld: the antithesis of compulsive, trial-and-repeated-error WeaponWorld. We have trapped ourselves in the redundant morphic resonances of post-industrial warfare perfectly replaceable on PeaceWorld. We should think of it as a planetary theme park carefully crafted to enchant its active architects as much as its passive occupants, with no-one left outside unwillingly.
I repeat: that is up to us.
Weapon mentors have obscured peace mentality and publicized weapon mentality throughout history. Recorded history is nothing more than the glorification of weapon states. If pure peace civilizations ever existed, they disappeared, erased from history and therefore ‘pre-historic.’
Weapon managers maintain that too much peace technology reduces (much less attractive) weapons efforts. They believe that popular hopes for evenhanded prosperity will outstrip their ham-fisted methods of social control, if peace managers allocate too many resources to non-military goods and services. They fear that peace softens the people, makes it less pugnacious in war—more ‘sophisticated, cosmopolitan and decadent.’ Minimal peace technology is their only acceptable alternative to open revolt and warfare.
Emphasize the word ‘minimal.’ Peace accustoms people to resolving their differences quietly; too much aggression disturbs them. Weapon mentors protest: “If we let this decadence go unchecked, weapon barbarians will overrun us.”
Martial poverty and hierarchical brutality are the flip sides of peaceful abundance and pacifist vulnerability.
Francis Fukuyama’s infamous prediction in his End of History may come to pass in a manner he least expects and desires. The Thousand Year Reich of National-Capitalist weapon mentality that he venerates will collapse under its own contradictions—either in omnicidal holocaust or Learners’ peaceful transformation.
Let’s assume we were exploring a distant planet. It would be much like Earth, except its climate would be so tropical that hurricanes would gust past 300 MPH from time to time. Our expeditionary vehicles would have to anchor themselves to bedrock so raging winds wouldn’t blow them away. Scrooge-like interstellar logistics, however, would dictate that our vehicles be lightweight, nimble and fuel-efficient.
Fixed or featherweight? This paradoxical requirement forms an antinomy, a contradiction along every dimension of the problem. Solving both problems in the same design will produce a gas-guzzling monster that would tumble away at the third serious gust.
The weapon/peace antinomy is entirely comparable.
Picture us in a lush, green jungle otherwise empty. Let’s release two lizard varieties: mottled green ones (weapon technologies) and Day-Glo ones (peace technologies). Day-Glo lizards are fat, vegetarian and friendly; cammo ones are fast, venomous and mean. While they interbreed with equal fervor, Cammo lizards develop a cannibal taste for Day-Glo flesh and eggs.
After a few thousand years, how many Day-Glo lizards will survive? How much Day-Glo DNA will persist among Cammo lizards? Cammo characteristics will wind up marking every survivor.
The dominance of weapon mentality is not chiefly a dark conspiracy among a few psychopathic evildoers – though this too can happen – any more than sharper fangs would be among surviving lizards. Like them, we all conspire with the prevailing paradigm: in our case, weapon mentality. Unlike them, we could stop conspiring with WeaponWorld or transform the context of our conspiracy into PeaceWorld.
It’s that simple. We would simply need to make up our minds during the same generation, all of us with but few holdouts. For the first time in history, we have all the communication channels, peace infrastructure and mutual recognition we could need to do just that.
The problem is—do we have the guts?
Let’s look for a more sizzling illustration. Suppose the atmosphere had a slightly higher concentration of oxygen. Fires would ignite spontaneously and burn super hot.
Fire fighting would be The Elite Preoccupation: the dignitary’s duty and poor man’s obligation. Everyone – from toddlers to the elderly – could act out basic fire drills in their sleep. Babies, brought to life by the touch of a red-hot iron, would begin learning fire management during their first few breaths of life. In medicine, the most talented healers would be pyrologists who treated burns.
Schools, the media and popular culture would hyper-refine this blazing reality in hypnotic cycles of rote repetition. Hundreds more terms would describe ‘fire.’ Literature and mythos would bristle with uplifting tales of fire fighting heroes.
Traditional fire fighting technologies would engulf national budgets; they’d distort land development, planning and architecture. Compulsive taboos would smother every high-energy technology from kitchen matches to nuclear power. Masonry, cold metalwork and cave sculpting would replace all carpentry. Asbestos, its health hazards ignored, would be worth its weight in gold. Root crops might replace stemmed plants that grew too vulnerably above ground.
Their governments (each with its favorite method of fire management) might claim they devoted only a small fraction of the Gross National Product to Fire Management. They would fail to mention the fortunes that went up in flames during intermittent firestorms; and these titanic sums wouldn’t begin to cover the hidden costs and personal sacrifices their citizens had to accrue.
Periodically, the very real threat of conflagration might tempt these people to backfire most of their infrastructure preemptively. They might even sacrifice each other, in trembling forfeiture to their pyromaniac God(s) and ideologies. The hellfires of religion would burn bright and cold in fanatical imagination―even more so than they do in ours…
As alien observers, we’d trip over social contradictions and overhead costs that locals would find perfectly normal.
From now on, consider me a distant observer alienated from this world, as many Learners must see themselves. The military anarchy that prevails on this planet has nothing to do with us Learners, except to cast us as observers and desperate fixers castaway on a world of killer primates. Learners: I invite you to save your soul, no matter what may transpire from this mess—a humble gift to my brother and sister Learners with our back up against the wall.
From our perspective, this world would seem warped and its natives, swayed by compulsions we would find horrific. They, however, would find everything perfectly normal.
Slightly more enlightened natives might decry the most extreme demands of firefighting orthodoxy. For instance, they might politely suggest that human sacrifice should happen less often. But no argument would budge smug majorities from the familiar comfort of their prejudice; and the most sophisticated resistance would come from native ‘progressives’ immunized from positive transformation by their intensive study of cliché arguments of the past.
Assuming you could prove that the atmosphere’s oxygen concentration and inflammability had subsided and that all their prejudices and practices had become obsolete, they’d still resist transformation anyway, out of lazy habit, imaginary fear and mental inertia. The fear of fire would distort their social arrangements – and nobody would care – the way the fear of military aggression perverts ours. Just as they’d cling to their firefighting reflexes, we cling to our war fighting reflexes.
Yet another example. Suppose you were the chieftain of a barbarian horde that had overrun an ancient civilization. To begin with, you would ignore your victims’ cultural achievement. Even if you were cunning enough to order the scribes interrogated and their books translated to you in private, you’d still discard most of this useless claptrap. Your frustrated curiosity might make you look foolish in front of your lieutenants; knowledge of soft city ways might harm your warriors’ fighting spirit; traditional native culture might draw popular opposition into guerrilla liberation bands.
You would thus ensure that this written culture disappeared along with its literate cadre—by neglect and by design. You’d terrorize, enslave and overtax the locals until they lost the will to educate their children for anything but your plowfields and barracks square. Learning its literature, religion, history and mythos would become capital offenses. This is how nomad conquerors distanced themselves from their victims through ignorance and apartheid. They made this the spirit and letter of their law. Of our law.
Warrior clans dominated urban civilizations as long as they retained simpler nomad ways. Irrigated croplands were inhospitable to herds, and soft city habits induced military decadence. Therefore, farmlands were laid waste, irrigation systems breached and great cities razed on a regular basis. Only a small, portable fraction of urban wealth was looted; only those books that served weapon mentality were preserved. The remainder was burnt to ash and washed away in blood, including priceless peace archives, technologies and technicians: all of them obliterated.
Our societies enshrine weapon mentality at great peril to themselves. Inferior standards of living, astronomical taxes and cults of repression, all of them engender militant bigotry, institutional arrogance, escalating insanity. This results in exploding penal populations, tidal waves of corruption and super-stratified class hierarchies.
Society reacts to these irritants much the way a disturbed bee colony would. Goaded by these contradictions, proletariats gestate new proto-elites eager to revolt. Our attack reflexes shift to overdrive.
Battle elites usually hire out to protect the info elite, but only so long as this guardianship brings them great profits. Once matters begin to fall apart for the info elite, more and more battle elites will side with the most vicious proto-elite (revolutionary cell) they can find.
Warfare provides a vast outlet for popular discontent. With surprising ease, info elites can shift responsibility for social evils from themselves to declared enemies internal and external. An info proletariat at war submits to its elite until it is convinced it has won or has bled dry. Passive witnesses to continuous government assaults against harmless minorities and outsiders, the info proletariat becomes disgusted, terrorized, relieved, fascinated, unified, regimented and finally inspired to commit worse crimes against humanity.
Foreign attacks against a ‘civilian’ population strengthen its will to resist. It doesn’t matter whether these attacks are mounted by stinking cavalry hordes, gleaming bomber streams or wild-eyed terrorists. Such assaults raise the proletariat’s tolerance for the failings of its elite.
This siege mentality reduces opportunities for effective dissidence. Info elites often galvanize this passive popular support by organizing domestic terror and international adventures. They hold unarmed combatants (civilians) hostage by controlling their relatives in the military and vice versa.
This is standard practice in America. Since almost no one has a taste for war, useless wars are initiated (as profitable for weapon ghouls as they are harmful to the troops and costly to their relatives), then skeptical civilians are condemned for refusing to provide moral support. We are told we must “support our sacrificial troops, if not the war itself.” If you are against the war, you are against the troops; if you are against the troops, you are not patriotic and may not criticize the war. Deadly circular logic.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Carroll Quigley’s unfinished thesis, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, (New York, the Macmillan Company, 1961), makes excellent reading on the topic of history. From pages 50 to 62, he contrasts:
“Instruments”: social organizations that fulfill their mandate effectively, with
“Institutions” whose members adopt illegitimate goals.
Some institutional leaders abandon their instrument’s mandate through personal weakness. Others focus overmuch on their own contribution. “The purpose of military discipline is to spit shine shoes and salute superiors; that of military training, to eliminate accidents.” Often they yield to laziness, mediocrity, neglect, greed, simony and inferior precedent. At other times, they refuse to accept new training, equipment and circumstances. Others, often the most powerful, are merely corrupt.
Besides, the largest chunk of most problems is solved with the first few increments of energy used to resolve it. The remainder of the problem demands more and more effort. Solving the last few details requires infinite energy, like pushing an object to the speed of light with a Newtonian mass driver.
In order to achieve the most progress, we needn’t solve most problems down to their last detail. Instead, we should redefine each problem so as to reapply the first, most efficient increment of energy to resolve it. Then redefine the problem, resolve that efficiently, and so on.
As social instruments decay into institutions by failing at this redefinition, their leaders mismanage more and more effort with less and less valid results. Instead, they ignore new breakthroughs and compound past errors. They give more importance to packaging and intent than to content and results.
Three outcomes arise from this “tension of development.”
Failing institutions resort to reaction. This reactionary outcome spirals antagonists into vicious cycles of injustice, dissent and suppression.
They reform themselves into viable instruments. Emergency leaders take over from ineffectual timeservers and their new instrument becomes more honest and competent.
New instruments assume real power by circumvention. They leave former institutions as hollow husks that fulfill ceremonial, cosmetic functions only. For example, parliament overrules a degenerate monarchy and limits it to leading annual parades and pageants; or a Roman emperor bullies Senators while honoring the Senate with many traditional distinctions (as did the almost-emperor Marius).
Weapon managers affirm that international corporations are the most disinterested form of social organization. They’ve concluded that stable government requires public disinterest more than any other attribute. I wonder who funded their research?
For this situation to endure, corporations must assume all the rights of an individual: freedom of speech and assembly, plus immunity from liability unless proven in a court of law, plus a million times more wealth and power than any individual—without corresponding vulnerabilities or responsibilities. Finally, a continuous and unlimited lifespan instead of our common mortality. In other words, they must become organizational monarchies. Long live King Cola!
By their estimate, the most vital social assets are an apathetic, poorly educated and motivated electorate—and the shadow-puppet political infrastructure needed to groom it. Just another attempt by reactionaries to resimplify our political landscape back to medieval norms.
Learners insist it is not disinterest we really require – or so much fine reasoning – as passion.
“The heart accepts a conclusion for which the intellect subsequently finds the reasoning. Argument follows conviction. Man often finds reasons in support of whatever he does or wants to do.” Gandhi quote, taken from Young India (weekly newspaper), Navajivan, 1919-32. Taken from Raghavan Iyer’s The Moral and Political Thought of Gandhi, Oxford University Press, London, 1973, p. 18.
Human disinterest does not exist. Our perceived self-interests tug us where they will, even mass extinction. When we abandon our real needs and succumb to mortal panic, we submit to short-term greed, arrogance, cowardice, denial and sadism—actually schadenfreude.
Suffering from serial hierarchies of vicious Corporals, the German people coined this term to describe the shady delight some people take in the misfortune of others. Such people are happiest when they hurt people bad or gloat over their suffering at third hand.
Russians have an equivalent term: zloradtsvo. The 19th century Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadeyev, wrote:
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that, as it were, are not members of mankind but exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.”
This lament could apply just as well to every weapon nation.
Tsar Nicholas I had him formally declared insane and placed under house arrest (no exit, no visitors; think about that) until he recanted. Pyotr was the first of many Russian political prisoners on psychiatric grounds.
I suspect that any linguistic group would coin such a term after a recent bout of tyranny. Now that the tyranny of corporations has become commonplace throughout the world, a more accurate Anglo-Saxonism might be shadism.
Sadism is sexual arousal from another’s pain: a perversion that preoccupies only a jaded few. Unlike it, shadism is taught to each of us surprisingly early and often. By means of infinite rehearsals and painful repetition, we’ve become expert shadists, equally at home as its co-dependent victims and expert tormentors. We administer Hell on Earth because we’ve been brought up to admire fearful hatred and begrudge fearless love—in slavish submission to what has been taught us most often.
It is time we invoked our better nature and nurtured it in a global peace of our making.
“Evolution is always experimental. All progress is gained through mistakes and
their rectification. No good comes
fully-fashioned ... but has to be carved out through repeated experiments and
growth. The same law controls social and
political evolution also. The right to
err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of
all progress.” A Gandhi quote from
Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Though of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1973, p. 354.
One of weapon mentality’s most corrosive myths is that we are innately evil. According to this myth, we are stricken by some ill-defined but primeval sin, surrounded by evil because full of it; no good can come from our rotten efforts at improving the world. We might as well capitulate to civic evil, seek marginal and fleeting self-improvement instead. Marginal, in reality, because we backslide with horrific ease, and fleeting because we die soon anyway and our private upgrades disappear with us.
This “No good…” idea is ridiculous if you think about it. My foot doesn’t need to be the World’s Most Beautiful one, nor do I need to waste my entire life manicuring it, to kick trash off the sidewalk.
Just like this sentence, so difficult for me to write and for you to decipher, doesn’t need to be perfect. Honest error, if admitted and allowed, can play a valid part in the overall scheme of things. Perfection is not necessary; excellence is required.
The main difference between reactionaries and progressives? The former believe that everyone is innately evil, while the latter hold people to be essentially good. Go ahead; ask anyone that question, then about his or her voting record. See for yourself.
My experience leads me to the opposite conclusion. Almost everyone does the best he or she can, under most circumstances—often heroically and at great sacrifice. Sure, some people are rotten to the core, but rare on the ground (at most, four percent). Sure, I bear my share of shameful memories. Also sure, everyone fails, from time to time, and does something shameful. But – on the whole and more often than not – we are all pedaling as fast as we can.
Look; if evil were so prevalent, we’d get run over almost every time we crossed the street! That is not the norm except in war.
The essence of sinful error – or any other human weaknesses, for that matter – is that we can straighten it out through gradual stages of learning and self-correction. We are experts at this task. In other words, progress entails deliberate evolution: personal, institutional, cultural, psychic and genetic: each evolutionary facet interdependent, synergistic and holistically vital.
Which leaves you with the responsibility to see the relationship between things, what increases or decreases what, and the importance and unimportance of things―not television, not politicians; you.
The notion of original sin blunts our obligation to improve the world. It’s not a matter of abandoning it in favor of improving the world, but of clarifying both concepts.
Like dinosaurs, we have reached a crossroads without realizing it. An ‘ideal’ environment sustained them for ages, then minor changes flickered and the die-offs began. They ran out of time, weren’t flexible enough, found no way to trade tons of bone, sinew and armor plate – painfully accumulated for eons – before extinction overcame them.
We retain some advantages over dead owners of those monster bones. Our greatness resides in part on our ability to love one another: a trait we share with other pack-scavengers. Another critical human talent may be the way we provide for the young, the sick and the helpless. Elevated levels of empathy and solicitude may be the true measure of our greatness.
To review: empathy equals greatness; sociopathy equals deformity but military advantage.
In some troubled souls, mistrust and ‘realism’ have replaced compassion. This degeneracy pegs us lower than some dinosaurs that watched over each other and their young.
Each of us, no matter how abused and abusive today, received some loving care earlier on, to survive to this day. Could most felons have become so because they weren’t handled lovingly enough, early enough? Some say that the most accurate predictor of criminal behavior is prior abuse of the prospective criminal as a child.
Mischief is easy; any fool can do serious harm without breaking a sweat. Conversely, human nurturing takes a whole lot of hard work. Reducing care to economize would be about as stupid as starving to death to save on grocery bills.
If we could tabulate the amount of violence on Earth into one sum of X energy, then our wealth would equal the care we expend in thousands of X, minus the one wasted in untruth and violence. The sum of human care must always dwarf that of harm, lest we perish.
Today, kinetic care is dangerously level with the potential energy of our weapons. Think about it. How many mothers’ hugs would it take to equal the energy of one hand grenade, one nuclear detonation or all of those we’ve buried so expensively in silos and submarines, exploding together?
Basically, our greatness resides in how well we share Learning. Keep in mind, each generation must relearn the sum total of human knowledge; only then may we add our little contribution. Anything not relearned by someone must be forgotten and disappear, or sink into the collective superconscience.
Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar postulates that a whole sub-universe of information is hardwired into us and comes online as we mature. This programming won’t initialize, however, until benign external stimuli activate internal software. To become fully aware and sane, we must be nurtured with tender loving care.
Unlike those doomed dinosaurs trapped in extravagant suits of armor plate, our elastic, reprogrammable brains give us the means, motive and opportunity to shed our liabilities and redefine ourselves virtually overnight. It might be messy and might not work all at once, but the possibility remains: learning how to do it better.
Learning dwarfs lesser preoccupations like sex, predation and genetic survival. These inflated human motivations have become the champions of scientific prejudice. They serve Conspiracies of Greed the same way Social Darwinism and Predestination once served them, as weapon myth propaganda to justify institutional evil. Unlike these lesser drives magnified beyond proportion, Learning is the real foundation of self-awareness and PeaceWorld.
Until recently, historians busied themselves collecting the biographical tidbits of micro-history. They simplified vast upheavals of climate, resources and civilization by dissecting the lives of a few key potentates; by reducing humanity’s opulent transactions to the whims of a few courted egomaniacs and the muffled sobs of countless victims. Historians, beginning with Herodotus and ending with today’s pundits, wrote: “King (President, Caliph, Dictator, etc.) X decreed A, B and not C. His Dukes (Ministers, Secretaries, Viziers, Satraps, whatever), 1 through 6 with the exception of 4, revolted against his policies, thus provoking...” an unending crisis of biographical reductionism and gross simplification.
Our acceptance of this simplification is about as sensible as compacting 16 million person-years of human genius, hope and labor we accumulate every day, into a few wisps of newsprint and vapid newscast.
I hate biography. Art transcends life; it records dreams into culture. Shoddy dreams, not for very long; magnificent and terrible dreams, lovingly and virtually forever compared to our brief lifetimes. Art takes life’s little irrelevancies and transforms them into a holism greater than the sum of its parts.
Biography reverses this process. It turns cultural dreams into a long, obsessive chronicle of nit-picking primate politics; of pecking order torture; of the growth, displacement and destruction of meat puppets and the mindless tide of their body fluids. Disgusting.
Setting aside this gloss for a moment, the info proletariat raises the leadership it requires through a process of organic hyper-democracy somewhat akin to a bee colony’s. Our intimate involvement in this process makes it seem more complex and subjective.
During the last few decades, dissatisfied historians have consolidated massive compendiums of correspondence and anecdotes into macro-histories. In so doing, they’ve attempted to chronicle the life and times of entire peoples over la longue durée (lah low+ng duray, the long haul). Preliminary attempts have been made to analyze history from multi-disciplinary perspectives: epidemiology, meteorology, geoseismicity, biogeography, ecology, memetics, psychohistory, herstory and sociobiology, among others. The more interdisciplinary these studies, the more novel and enlightening their conclusions. They’ve let us dispel a whole pack of absurdities put forward earlier and quickset in our spirit, since.
This breakup of old beliefs induces scary insecurity. We hesitate to believe in much of anything any longer. Nothing is easy to decide—not enough data points and not enough time to collect them. We could rewire the world so there would be plenty of time: time enough for those who shared peace to collect their thoughts in a more leisurely fashion and come up with better decisions on every scale.
As our point of view broadens, personal idiosyncrasies dwindle to irrelevance; mere individuals merge into the crowd and social behavior becomes easier to track. Near-identical patterns, stresses and energy flows emerge on different scales of space-time—as forecast by chaos theory.
The dynamics of a shoreline would be more difficult to track if we attempted to follow the path of each grain of sand (especially ‘exceptional’ ones). On the contrary, we should study the lowest common denominators of surf, wind and tide. A deeper understanding of world history would require that we remove ourselves from our comforting, reductive contexts: the self-referential, biographical, nationalistic, piously sanctimonious, and human—even the life-as-we-know-it and linear-entropic.
Recent photos of delicate Earth have been taken from outer space. They suggest a new perspective shift that would reveal life-as-we-know-it as mere luminescent pond scum writhing across a smallish marble of blue porcelain thinly glazed with gas and water, orbiting serenely around a perfectly ordinary star. This perspective shift might allow us to isolate significant aspects of history, provided we paid due reverence to a universe aglow with sacred intent.
Remarkable things come to light at this scale of vision. Decisive incidents resonate with equivalents from the past, influence current events and distort future probabilities. Accidents of individuality, chronology and locality (that teachers love to make their students cram) lose their illusory significance except as place markers and shortcut jargon.
Carroll Quigley focused his historical vision on continental scales. Such diverse writers as Ryszard Kapuscinski, Rian Malan, Antje Krog and John Del Vecchio sought this level of reverence in their reportage.
On the other hand, many butcher geniuses have abused this scale of vision. For example, either reject Hitler’s Mein Kampf or don full biohazard shielding before you crack it open. That creep was certifiable. He wanted to replace the Jews: the Chosen People of biblical God, with Good Germans. In so doing, he would have had to kill 1) every Jew on Earth, and 2) anyone who recalled the Jews from their readings of Biblical/Koranic/western history.
This collective insanity is nothing new. A hundred and fifty generations of weapon mentors have invoked man-aping gods, hyperactive heroes, raw might, econologic, dialectics, national honor, bloodline purity, scientific positivism (“I’m positive you’re wrong”), post-modern nihilism and any other heady superstition they could dream up to arouse it. Nazism was merely one of their most spectacular failures at corporate social engineering. They have had many more, before and since, that failed so consistently because they ignored the key, sacred context. Proper worship of it would have cancelled their sickly ambitions and favored genocides.
Bringing on a dizzying sense of moral detachment and loss of empathy, they’ve argued more and more persuasively for fatalistic determinism (as revealed in Elias Canetti’s cheerless Crowds and Power) and Nazi mercilessness. Their fear-driven visions were pathetic attempts to simplify the terrifying complexity of reality by squeezing all life, beauty and reverence from it.
These deluded folks may have failed us in the past; but that is no reason to become credophobes and stop believing in anything: the quickest way back to fascism. Whatever the risk, we must cultivate our gift of vision.
I doubt if anyone who has read a little history can use words like ‘humanitarian, humane and human’ as analogues for ‘kindly, compassionate and just-plain-not-stupid.’ Typical mass human behavior is weapon-based. So far, massed humans have failed to earn the title “civilized.” Clustered humans never adhered to the good until they had exhausted every evil.
That’s not surprising. Veterans, athletes and professionals don’t become real experts until they have screwed up every other alternative repeatedly. Then they must accept at gut level a better way to do things, and practice it despite recurrent errors and inconsistencies, until it becomes automatic. Just the way humanity will find its ultimate success at peace, despite and because of its billion-times-repeated weapons errors.
Celebrate Olympic athletics! Celebrate the deep thought of the PeaceWorld Agora.
Human cruelty is less justifiable than a hungry predator’s. Auschwitz is a monument to typical human behavior: its murderous rituals re-enacted by every nation in recorded history—on a slightly cut-down scale and perhaps a more pastoral setting, at least most of the time.
No nation or creed can claim clean outcomes. Every surviving culture has been the masterpiece of maniacs, tyrants, genocides and their weapon mentor apologists. The bovine mass of humanity has tolerated them and their bloody fantasies like horseflies that only require an occasional swipe of the tail. History has exalted civilizations with the bloodiest hands; it has erased from collective memory every society of exceptional peacefulness.
Our weapons institutions peddle their categorical world-view across a vast range of multi-media. In pathetic pursuit of flawless certitude, weapon mentors attempt to suck all truth, beauty and mystery from life.
Despite the whine of chainsaw logic, its patent certainties are obvious lies any child could see through. Indeed, young ones see quite clearly through this adult hypocrisy. That’s why we spend so much time and effort breaking their spirits and denying their ideals while they’re still tender and fragile.
We witness many of these contradictions every day. Many official truths are obviously inferior to their rejected counterparts. Our social creeds are so toxic, none of their adherents need seduce all parties. We find it easier to insult, terrorize and murder the Other—or tolerate those who do so on our behalf.
We could clean house the moment we chose to reject this millennial brainwash. Once we adopted Truth and Non-violence as our primary inspirations, the term ‘Learner’ might reflect our enormous hunger for good (kalotropism) and we might re-earn the title ‘civilized’.
We should defy two more myths typical of weapon mentality.
According to the first of these subtle delusions, each of us must fulfill impossible ideals of personal sainthood. We cannot hope for widespread improvement until we’ve become proper saints, first. Any hint of personal weakness confirms our Kosmic Korruption.
One may not criticize the current state of affairs without first convincing his audience that he’s a bona fide saint. If the authorities can stick some accusation against him, he’s unfit to comment on social issues. Since everyone has something to hide, no one may comment except as a friend of the authorities who will shield him from public attack. Anyone who defies those authorities is at their mercy. How convenient for weapons mentality!
Thus global improvement is impossible until we’ve all become angels. In the meantime, let’s just sit on our hands and wait for Jesus to serve us the Kingdom of Heaven on a silver platter. For two thousand years now, we’ve sat on our hands. I’m tired of waiting.
In John 14, 2-3, Christ said, “In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.” Amen, brother.
In the meantime, it’s obviously up to us. I must return to His Parable of the Talents. The Master left us a sum of money. When He returns, He will be happier with those who have increased it than with those who buried it so as not to lose any. It is not a question of saving one’s soul by doing nothing else, but of taking enormous risks to earn more for God.
Meanwhile no healthy outlet remains for our frustration. It festers within us until WeaponWorld can Heimlich it out of us in warfare. Behavioral repression multiplies with regulatory density, as more and more meddlesome officials adjust the details of our lives and less and less room remains for risky self-expression.
Walled in by our own incapacity, we prickle with self-loathing; cursing the faults of others, we plot futile revenge. We bitterly resent growing intrusions on our precious time and assets in the material world. As inspiration and satisfaction grow more and more remote and abstract, real obligations and penalties skyrocket around us. Perpetually unfree, we double and redouble the coils of our enslavement. Mischief becomes extremely tempting; it seems to offer some relief from our endless round of obligation and compromise. The routine expectation of mischief provides officialdom more reasons to grind us down. Sooner or later, we begin yearning that a vast maelstrom come sweep everything away and resimplify our lives.
Life never makes things simpler, death does. Get used to it.
Countless young bulimics, addicts and attempted suicides – their nerve ends raw and aglow – convey the same unheard lament. “I’m not good enough for this!” Good enough to do what? Cope with the endless demands of empty moralism, or handle weapon mentality's hyper-refined evil?
As we pre-stupefied adults decline into ‘maturity,’ we suffer analysis paralysis from orthodoxy’s ad hominem (“to the man,” appealing to prejudice) brainwash. We, in turn, chastise our idealistic juniors for having the gall to skip the only approved track: absolute weapon mentality. We’ve convinced ourselves that peace mentality can never be ‘realistic’ enough. We’re supposed to grow up and abandon it.
Grow up and embrace peace. I dare you.
To tell you the truth, we are the best people we can be: the ultimate sentient masterpieces of God, DNA and the Universe. Get used to it – there is nobody better than you – nobody can take your place and do a better job. There should be no need for radical self-improvement until our radically improved institutions support our efforts without contradiction or denial. Would success be possible otherwise, even after a thousand billion reincarnations?
The second unfortunate weapon myth absolves our institutions. Unlike the individual, our institutions are sacred, error-free, opaque to analysis and exempt from improvement—except every few centuries during brief stretches of bloody revolution.
Even in the most advanced countries, the approved method of expressing public disapproval for gross institutional blunders is a protest march: perfectly dumb, bovine and trivial if not detrimental to the cause. If the topic in question is of any importance, this rally will culminate in a police riot: more propaganda headlines in favor of our blundering institutions.
For example, the 1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization was said to have caused “millions of dollars of damage.” All of it was attributed to riotous misconduct by what turned out to be a very well behaved, very middle class crowd of perfectly legitimate protestors, at least before the police stampeded them.
True, some pimply hooligans broke a few plate glass windows, set fire to a garbage dumpster or two and wrecked a few cars—allowing them to play the video game, Black Flag Anarchy, in real-time. That damage couldn’t have totaled more than a couple hundred thousand 1999 dollars, tops. I was there, before and after, and saw it all. Afterwards, I called the city paper newsroom and challenged them to itemize the famous “millions of dollars of damage.” No one bothered to return my phone call and no one itemized that damage in print, that I could find.
Nonetheless, this police riot has gone down in official history as a vicious mass attack by the masses against property and propriety. Exactly the same thing happened during a big pacifist demonstration against the Vietnam War in Seattle in 1968; its reportage, equally misleading.
Is this how our vaunted media commit current events to historic memory? I can only conclude: “Shoot, what sophisticated system of political feedback!” See Learning to Dance for the Learner alternative.
“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Of course, this biblical quote might also mean that Caesar owns nothing and is owed nothing. After all, what authority can Caesar claim when compared to God’s? The opposite meaning jams our senses. Weapon mentors worship Jesus’ torture rack and drown His sacred ideals in blood: symbolic or all-too-real blood, take your pick.
What more can we expect from weapon Christianity—that venerable relief program for smug desperadoes? The other world religions are not far behind in stealth hypocrisy. Religions of abnegation do weapon mentality a great favor; they alienate the best people from practical politics into listless isolation and pseudo-mystic contemplation. The only creeds more despicable than those that encourage people to give up on the real world are those that encourage them to simplify the real world with more violence.
“Just how confused we are over what we mean by individualism
can most easily be seen by looking at the West from the outside. Buddhist societies are horrified by a great
deal in the West, but the element which horrifies them the most is our
obsession with ourselves as a subject of unending interest. By their standards, nothing could be
unhealthier than a guilt-ridden, self-obsessed, proselytizing white male or
female selling God or democracy or liberalism or capitalism with insistent
superior modesty. It is clear to the
Buddhist that this individual understands neither herself nor his place. He is ill at ease in his role; mal dans sa peau; a hypocrite
taking out his frustrations on the world.”
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship
of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 469.
Yet the essential good will of these believers let their religion survive, despite its errors and hypocrisy compounded by their support of WeaponWorld and worsened by it. PeaceWorld would allow good politics and good religion in symbiosis: each reinforcing the good in the other and curbing its ill effects.
Officials love to administer weighty oaths. The nastier the institution, the more rumbling its oath of allegiance and the more often it must be invoked. Hitler was an enthusiastic organizer of mighty oath-taking ceremonies that bound his people more closely to him—to their ultimate destruction. It is easier to get people to murder each other if you first make them swear an oath to that effect.
Every weapon society glorifies suicidal self-sacrifice. Prism propaganda contradicts “live and let live” principles everyone knows are preferable. Paul Lackman points to the Japanese kamikazes and mass suicides of World War II; but all the sacrificial tendencies of weapon mentality should be included, since they are essentially interchangeable.
What state of mind would you have to assume to drop a heavy bomb on a bustling city? Picture yourself flying over a major metropolis. See it clearly? Ok, now drop your bomb. You would have to be nuts: either a desperate terrorist embittered by a lifetime of suffering and humiliation, or a talented, dedicated and brave military pilot fulfilling your military obligation in exchange for an opportunity to gratify your love of flying.
The outcome would be the same: a flaming ruin of debris and body parts where crowds of people once thrived, for us to clean up afterwards at tremendous expense and with broken hearts. A total waste in any case. As if there was no poverty in the world, as wealth and good fellowship were in such surplus that we could waste it this way.
Modern culture reveres noble warriors who endure torture with stoicism, seek out privation and make defiant last stands against overwhelming odds. Cold bloodedly, they must violate the basic laws of humanity. They are hallowed because they’ve stepped beyond the morality of common sense.
One way or another, our institutions induce mass suffering without opposition. Sufferers are dehumanized and distanced from the mainstream. By definition, individuals are expendable, and institutions, irreplaceable.
The dictates of peace management would be exactly contrary. Every individual is a precious dynamo of good and evil. We should develop and modify new social instruments to magnify their good traits and channel the evil ones into semi-harmless games and theatrics.
Despite the holy intercessions of Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, the ratio of good to bad human acts has never seemed to change throughout history. Good Pagans were just as upright and numerous in proportion back then, as good church people are, today. Vicious Pagans were just as obnoxious and numerous as today’s religious/ideological extremists. The human sacrifice they demand today, through jihad and holy war (religious or ideological), are continuations of bloody-handed sacrifices they performed face-to-face in the past. Even while many non-believers, devout atheists and situational ethicists straddled their fences, uncertain which way the wind blew.
So we’ve never changed the ratio of good and bad human actions. None of our saints have, none of our Prophets have, none of our Saviors; and I doubt that anyone else will manage it in the foreseeable future. Big deal.
We can, however, shift the quality of our behavior toward the good (or bad) end of the ethical spectrum. For example, we could strengthen the Bill of Rights and shift our society towards better ethics, or revert to genocide and slavery and shift more people and their decisions toward evil.
Thomas Jefferson enslaved himself to the abuse and hypocrisy of slavery. Suffering from that burden, he was a lesser man than the most bigoted cracker would be, once slavery was abolished. In the same way, we can remain exactly the same people we are today, yet become better practitioners of Good. We have merely to replace our weapons institutions with more sensible ones of peace.
Valid social instruments invite criticism and transformation. There is nothing irreducibly good about our institutions. We have merely adopted them for the time being. They deserve no more devotion than fairy mushroom rings in a druidic oak grove. Institutions that go overlong unchallenged tend to become riddled with self-serving parasites and authoritarian nitwits; they fail more and more spectacularly over time.
You, me, everyone is directly responsible for progress. A healthy conscience makes no exceptions—unlike our sickly institutions that mass-produce exceptions. Whenever an institution becomes so inflexible that it supports more evil than good, it should be exposed to instant, serial correction. Evildoers should be banished from institutional power, the moment they begin improvising on the theme: “We weren’t responsible. We were just following orders, policies, profit guidelines, the competition, etc.”
“Few things are more revealing about man as warrior than his
tendency to slough off responsibility for the suffering and tragedy he inflicts. … Why can men do together without conscience things that
would torment them unendurably if done singly? …
“Seated in our living rooms, remote from action and passion,
most of us like to believe that we shall never yield again to abstract
hatreds… Historically, our record for
stemming the tide has not been good …
“Perhaps even worse, few of us ever know how far fear and
violence can transform us into creatures at bay, ready with tooth and
claw. If the war taught me anything at
all, it convinced me that people are not what they seem or even think
themselves to be. Nothing
is more tempting than to yield oneself, when fear comes, to the dominance of
necessity and to act irresponsibly at the behest of another. Freedom and responsibility we speak
of easily, nearly always without recognition of the iron courage required to
make them effective in our lives.” J.
Glenn Davis, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Harcourt,
Brace and Co., New York, 1959, pp. 168-169.
The day after Nazi conquerors ordered Danish Jews to sew a yellow star on their clothing, the King of Denmark took his morning ride wearing a yellow star. Many of his subjects followed his noble lead and thus restored the honor of their defeated nation.
This turns out to be a magnificent legend. Quite often during the Nazi occupation, King Christian X took his morning horseback ride downtown without escort to stay in touch with his people. The Germans never imposed the yellow star on Danish Jews, but on Jews elsewhere.
Very few non-Jews wore that fatal badge, anywhere.
The fact remains that almost every Danish Jew was hustled off to Sweden and relative safety, under the Nazis’ flaring muzzles. It was generally concluded by the Danes, that if Nazis had imposed the yellow star, their King would have been the first to wear one. If Learners could make sure every King were so honorable, this book would advocate monarchy. Indeed, PeaceWorld would encourage an international nobility (by merit rather than inheritance), as long as it remained trustworthy and effectively self-policed.
When you confront the common dilemma of following regulations or giving someone a helping hand without harming others, do the latter with conviction. If you oversee such people, protect their obligation to do good. If these decisions were commonplace, many protective regulations would become redundant. If the criminal employees of some institution won’t clean up their act, they cannot claim our support. Without our support, their pet institutions would collapse—regardless of the level of terror they might inspire.
We occupy an incredibly shoddy world stage. Look at it! It is begging for improvement.
Sir Lawrence Olivier’s revenant ghost could recruit his favorite actors into a troupe of brilliant workaholics obsessed with thespian perfection. These worthies could take years to rehearse their scenes and months longer to perfect their costumes. But if they staged their Lear in a closed garbage dumpster, that performance would be flawed, no matter how intrepid their delivery.
I was once told by some jokers at my expense, that such a scene would be worth watching. As a sad lesson in morality, perhaps? I would rather watch this Lear played close to perfection on an excellent stage.
Misguided by weapon mentality, we’ve wasted lifetimes fine-tuning our personal perfection amidst a global concentration camp. Once our pursuit of learning, abundance, justice and wilderness turns this garbage dumpster WeaponWorld into a PeaceWorld worthy of our brilliance – and only then – our quest for self-perfection may bear fruit. Until then, we waste precious lifetimes on feel-good palliatives and throwaway sainthood, simply to feel better about ourselves despite our utter failure.
The proof resides in the last few thousand years of history. Misreading the instruction of our prophets, we’ve zealously pursued nothing more than personal sainthood. Despite this ceaseless quest, we’ve bungled our social schemes, suffered moral bankruptcy and invited military disaster into our homes to spoil the weekend feast.
That's nothing to joke about.
When our institutions encourage evil (the way the institution of slavery did), they lead us to worsen the common lot despite our best intentions. Once our institutions will direct us to do good more often, without compromise and free of paradox, we will behave better without any need for extraordinary self-improvement. We will discover the beings we really are, perfectly adapted to live together in peace and harmony despite our transient weaknesses. We will find that our personal sainthood is surprisingly advanced, once our institutions are perfected.
These regrettable reversals of personal and institutional priorities arise from common distortions of our historical perspective. From this twisted but familiar perspective, our institutions seem like monolithic granite outcrops carved and polished by centuries of painstaking trial and error. On the other hand, each mortal life seems as ephemeral as the first raindrop on a hot tin roof. It may seem reasonable to endow our institutions with categorical attributes of permanence and perfection, and burden our perishable selves with nagging demands for never-ending self-improvement.
Learners will reverse these attributes. Our institutions are frail stopgaps we’ve jury-rigged just to get by, these last few centuries. Human traits have taken millions of years to adapt us perfectly to this world and to each other. We may transform our institutions in a matter of weeks, months or years; but the chore of changing (improving) human nature would be like grinding down Mt. Everest with a toothbrush.
The problem remains: how to improve our institutions peacefully and thus with near-universal consent? We must recruit all those who have given up in despair, and seek the consent of those who fantasize they would have something to lose in the transformation.
How to avoid adjusting everything—with, by and for the sword?
There remains only one alternative to the pitfalls of the weapon/peace antinomy: PeaceWorld. We must infuse our constellation of political metaphors with a superior vocabulary and dialectic. We must walk our talk for the first time in history, relegate weapon technology and weapon mentality to vestigial status.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor
alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very
much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of
expression for their society … The fact of the matter is that the “real world”
is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the
group.” Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a
Science,” Language (Charlottesville, Va.: Linguistic Society of America), vol.
5 (1929), p. 209.
“We are being taught by all the foregoing to assume as
closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience and the competence of
God.” Buckminster Fuller, Critical
Path, St.
Martin’s Press, p. 251.
During the Second (sic) World War, every European faced the same choice: defy the Nazis or accept their creed. Today, it’s up to you. No time is left to duck key issues (a favorite human pastime) and nowhere is left to run and hide. From New Zealand to Novaya Zemlya, our choice will lie somewhere between mortal risk and moral bankruptcy, unless we choose to become a Learner worthy of the name. This text provides us some time to weigh your options before push comes to shove.
But first of all, you will have to heave some mental ballast overboard. The mental payload you should consider ditching has three layers, each including the former and making it worse. You can choose to be:
· Nescient: “I can only trust those ideas I have heard at least a hundred times before. Those concepts are least likely to get me in trouble. Nothing else matters.”
· Credophobic: “I don’t believe any of the BS they’ve shoveled into my brain, but I can’t afford to believe anything else.”
· Fanaticophobic: “I can only trust those who repeat familiar ideas to me. Anyone who testifies otherwise must be a fanatic, a crank case or a snake-oil merchant. No one can con me; I’m way too cool and classy for that.”
These days, almost everyone has turned into a fanaticophobe. What about you?
You can reject those reactions and put up with the social ostracism that will come with your rejection. Strike out on your own, for a change. Make up your own mind to take constructive risks. Only you can unplug your ears to new ideas (“Only you can prevent forest fires…”). That takes guts and mental discernment.
Do we have what it takes? I believe you do, since you have read this far.
The prevailing orthodoxy bids us attend a “New World Order” based on international corporate paternalism. This book calls these World Imperialist, Wimps. Current events reveal ongoing Wimp control exercises. Our spiritual hollowness, the environmental holocaust we witness against our will and the rise of militant chaosism – both micro/criminal and macro/military – reveal the corporate econologic that drives them. Televised thought-control beams industrial quantities of Hollywood trivia and Madison Avenue materialism into our brains. It does this to amplify our Wimp madness and veil its worst consequences.
From now on, when you think of a corporation, think of a capricious, enduring, licentious and dangerously stupid monarchy. Learners will deal with multinational corporations the way European republicans dealt with monarchies. Primitive, violent overthrow just provoked a more violent backlash, but intelligent and gradual substitution brought permanent improvement.
On the other hand, old school troglodytes maintain that a few ‘chosen ones’ should ‘return’ to some dreamland of uncertain provenance while the rest of us surrender to Wimp servitude. Hypnotically, these Prisms imprison themselves in their favorite ‘ism’. Be it individualism, libertarianism, ‘strict’ constitutionalism, nationalism, Nazi/Italian/Japanese national socialism, Soviet/Maoist national communism, American/Corporate national capitalism, radicalism, anarchism, racism, tribalism, religious fundamentalism or some other simplistic cure-all; it just means assembling with imaginary superiors and sacrificing imaginary inferiors who are completely similar—that’s all. By their Prism shall you know them.
The title Prism fits many miscreants. It applies to military autocrats, politburo absolutists, religious fanatics, government-paid and extra-governmental terrorists, ethnic genocides, crime barons and their secret brothers in the secret police, military-industrial extortionists, reactionary politicians and their know-nothing supporters—as well as you and I on a bad day. In search of soothing simplicity, such activists dehumanize their enemies by turning them into philosophical abstractions, the better to kill them.
In The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1959, J. Glenn Davis lists several warrior types and the way they abstract the Other into a perfect enemy.
Professional soldiers prefer to fight competent and courageous enemies; they hold lesser adversaries in contempt. Paradoxically, their enemies are to be despised and destroyed with professional efficiency as long as they resist, but treated honorably once they surrender. When civilians are tortured and killed, as they must be in war, (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), this must happen with ceremonious reluctance on the part of professional warriors.
Racist warriors turn their enemies into sub-humans. There is no room for mercy, human decency or redeeming values in their attitude—which adds a mechanical drudgery to war’s other insults.
The enemy of religious and ideological crusaders is not only subhuman but an Incarnation of Evil. He is in unimaginable revolt against God, the Leader or some other lofty principle. Killing him is not only a crusader’s filthy obligation, it is his divine calling. Expect even less mercy from such mass murderers.
In addition, compared to the glory of the abstraction they adopt, everyone’s well-being and survival are irrelevant, be they opponents, innocent bystanders, partners and even themselves—even if the adopted ideal forbids such aggression. For example, Shias and Sunnis fight each other even though they are practicing Muslims and therefore forbidden to do so in the Koran. Mohammed would not have been pleased.
May Learners never be so debased! You deadly cowards advocating mass murder will have no excuse, this time around.
On the other hand, irredeemably reasonable people consider their opponents fellow human beings and victims of forces beyond their control—especially during warfare. Contradictions between their healthy attitude and the brutal requirements of combat make this attitude (and sanity) difficult to maintain very long on the battlefield, where hesitation often leads to casualties and defeat. Jesus or survival?
Professional soldiers are particularly critical of this attitude. From their point of view, scorning the enemy simplifies the dangerous task of killing him and subduing his survivors. Thus, they prefer reflexive contempt (despite its mercilessness) to any undermining sense of fellow feeling. Since it’s hard to keep sharp focus while thinking two opposite thoughts, they feel equal contempt for anyone outside their military clan.
In This Thing of Darkness: a Sociology of the Enemy, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1994, pp. 36 et seq., James A. Aho lists five steps required to reify ethnic hatred. Reification means turning an abstraction, like bigotry, into a concrete thing.
1. Naming: a false characterization of one individual as a model of an abstract evil category.
2. Legitimization: validating this lie by subverting official findings.
3. Myth-making: creating a false history to confirm the lie.
4. Sedimentation: embedding these legends into the next generation’s memory as part of a group bonding dynamic.
5. Ritual: the traumatic, theatrical extinction of victims, often by ritual torture and the entrapment of their family.
6. We might add a sixth element, Martyrdom: the sacrifice of minor bigots to horrified authorities after the above-described Ritual, and their canonization by senior bigots who got away clean. God, how they love to feel sorry for themselves! Especially when they’ve gotten away with some incredible atrocity.
These habits are no doubt twisted versions of peace-equivalent ‘mixing bowl’ rituals. With a few minor rewrites of the theatrics involved, we could probably use them to promote mutual respect and social tolerance. Like most weapon rituals, they could be converted to the uses of peace with a little finagling.
It is interesting to note that, during frenzies of intertribal warfare, the most warlike tribes adopted prisoners of war to replace their heavy casualties. Thus, the most deadly bigots became experts at the art of turning bitter enemies into blood brothers. Life is paradox.
Today’s elite fanatics look forward to an ultimate orgy of Prismatic violence that would climax with the planetary, pan-toxin gangbang for which everyone’s been preparing these last few decades. The bio-chemo-nano-nuclear-scalar extermination of every hated Other, as well as the fearsome Other Within. Each of us denies our part in this upcoming disaster which could never have come to term without our devoted collaboration. Peace will gradually deteriorate until total war erupts spontaneously and unstoppably – unless we take vigorous steps to thwart it in the meantime.
Both Wimps and Prisms rely on weapon mentality. Their ethics are equally corrupt; their odds of long-term success, nil. Sooner or later, their power trips will degenerate into a blood bath. It is merely a question of time and weapon sophistication.
Fortunately, most people’s beliefs (or lack thereof) can be harnessed to peace struggle and Satyagraha, of which more in its own chapter.
This text proposes a different ideology, upheld by an army of one (me). It claims no sponsorship from the Skull & Bones, the Mujihadeen, the International Monetary Fund or any such stealth cut-throats. I hope this disclaimer tempts you to rally to the cause.
Learners will require the complete infrastructure humanity has assembled today, which must remain intact, flourishing and properly refined. What’s more, we will require that fewer and fewer people be deprived of home, homeland, security, livelihood and life.
Learners will address the needs of the rich with as much care as those of the info-proletariat. In other words, a thousand times more skillfully than weapon managers ever got away with. Unlike weapon dissidents, Learners will require the enthusiastic cooperation, expertise and capital management of current info elites. Without them, none of this transformation will be possible.
Humanity has barely accumulated enough capital and mutual good will to undertake this Learner transformation. Any massive societal breakdown (of the kind weapon dissidents keep longing for) would drive us to lower Levels of weapon barbarism and eventual annihilation. We cannot afford any more mass destruction, pilferage and terror of the type we’ve agreed – sigh! – was regrettably unavoidable.
As for those who would seek to annihilate civilization while they hone their personal and/or Good Book survival skills, I stand in awe of their panic. Whether they adhere to the Unabomber’s screed, to some fundamentalist’s rant or to murderous voices in their head, their traumatic simplification of reality bodes ill for everyone—themselves included. May Learners revive their petrified imagination and cure them of their craving for lethal simplification!
I recall reading about a young mountain tribesman who got arrested for enforcing a blood feud. When the police asked him why he had murdered an innocent stranger, he told them he had done it because his mother had urged him on. Women are just as lethal, in this context, as are men—and perhaps more so. They can serve the uses of peace even more vigorously.
So-called ‘primitive’ shamans once informed a foreign observer that the main difference between men and women is this. Men hunt, fight and chop down trees; women tend children, men and gardens. Thus, men and women are entitled to their natural differences in talent, strength and aptitude. But, most importantly, women must tell men when to stop. We have forgotten that dependable veto.
Nothing is as permanent as it seems, not even annihilation. During the next Paroxysm of soiled underpants panic and mass stupidity, we may destroy the biosphere, the human race or just human civilization. It would only be a matter of the megatonnage we chose to offload, laced with additional deadly disease, twisted weather and weapon grade nano-tech.
Those dismal outcomes are largely moot to someone who believes in reincarnation. We’ll just have to re-enact the entire vicious farce of history, to reach current levels of peace potential. After the radioactive rubble has stopped bouncing, we can take a few thousand years the re-enact the entire history of weapon civilization, or millions since the Dawn of Man, or billions more since life took hold on Earth.
Take your pick, you pompous bombardiers! You’ll have to wait awhile longer before you have bombs big enough to drive us further back in time. That’s all your malicious panic can do, just delay things a little longer, during life’s near-infinite time span.
How much more time do we wish to squander on historical re-enactments? How many more devourings, rapes, suicides, crucifixions, pogroms and massacres must we witness for our dining and dancing pleasure—before we start doing things right?
You can read all about war in newspapers and history books. What you will never read is this. After every war, things pretty much return to the way they were before the war began. Survivors interact, love and hate one another, care for lucky youngsters and go about their business. No war, no matter how “glorious and significant,” changes much of anything. The same result (a better one, more likely) could have been achieved during an equivalent peace. The only real difference resides in the decades of work it will take to replace the wealth and trust that war squandered and its irreplaceable casualties.
Everyone loses every war; there are no winners except weapon elites.
During the early development of terrestrial life, multi-cellular organisms underwent one dramatic transformation. Primitive colonies let central cells starve out and suffocate. Surrounded, as they were, by layers of 'selfish' cells along the outer rim, they couldn’t get enough food and oxygen to survive. More complex, three-dimensional life forms couldn’t evolve until ‘privileged’ outer cells collected surplus nutrients and oxygen, and passed them into the ‘poorer’ center. Then they had to transmit this talent unto latter generations.
Anyone who spouts "survival of the fittest" dogma of Social Darwinism had better contemplate "survival of the most generous.” Nature supports the most complex community of sharers that can tailor their lives to mutual support in this environment. See Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
“Over millions of years, nature’s ecosystems engineers have
been especially effective in the promotion of overyielding [my italics]. They have coevolved with other species that
exploit the niches they build. The
result is a harmony within ecosystems.
The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize
and cycle more materials and energy than is possible in similar
ecosystems. Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer too, but a bad
one. Not having coevolved [author’s
note: in intimate proximity—a peace technology we could cultivate] with the
majority of life forms we encounter around the world, we eliminate far more
niches than we create. We drive species
and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before, and
everywhere diminish productivity and stability.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A.
Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 112.
Once a Learner creed takes hold, info elites with surplus wealth will discover the titanic profits they may achieve (pragmatic yet fully moral) once they sustain the rest in superior equity. Compared to this abundance, their latest, most grandiose achievements will look like slumlord flops.
While everyone merits modest comforts, those who excel may outstrip that minimum by no more than five to one between the highest and lowest fifths of the population, and fifteen to one between the highest and lowest income percentiles. Thus, the higher the comfort ladder the poorest may climb, the more luxuries the rich may permit themselves in good conscience.
Here I go again, making pronouncements when Learners’ only real goal is to trigger global transformation, then step aside and let experts and specialists optimize their topics of passion. I should let a more qualified Learner do this work for me.
“Socioeconomic Democracy is a model socioeconomic subsystem
in which there is some form of Universal Guaranteed Personal Income [UGI] as
well as some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth [MAW], with both the
lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal
material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all society.” Robley E. George, Socioeconomic Democracy: An
Advanced Socioeconomic System, Praeger Studies on the 21st century, Praeger Publishers,
Westport, Connecticut, London, 2002, p. 91.
Learners will seek neither absolute economic equality nor unlimited economic opportunity. For that matter, it will be the nature of Learners to shun almost every absolute. Everything in moderation (except wisdom, beauty and elegance), well balanced and promoting peace.
Stalin and Pol Pot demonstrated that the former alternative leads to absolute poverty and millions of dead entrepreneurs of all kinds. Whether civilian or military, bureaucratic or professional, farm or factory managers; everyone who tried to get ahead was killed, and many more innocent of such ambition. The United States and Victorian England demonstrated the unhealthy polarization of wealth and poverty when the former is embraced without exception.
A golden mean must be found, so that everyone may live comfortably, entrepreneurship may be allowed its creativity and rightful gain, and a much healthier moral conscience prevails within society as a whole and each individual. It is a question of unearthing more wisdom: the ultimate goal of Learners.
A healthy conscience is the ultimate luxury, as much for the rich as the poor. Compared to it, their shining treasures and ringing honorifics are mere baby baubles and babble; all their sacrifice and suffering are a waste of time and energy.
I’m not talking about the satisfaction one may derive by clawing one’s way to the top of the human meat pile; or of that experienced by a few rich people who struggle for the rights of the poor. I’m talking about real self-worth, a healthy conscience and legitimate well-being. At one time sacrificed on the weapons altar, those things are worth a thousand times their diktats and conspicuous consumption, or our submission to suffering or rebellion against it―once we realize what we have missed.
All those prior political designations implied dogmatic stasis and one-dimensional thinking, not realistic political flexibility. They pinned us like butterflies on corkboard, the better to ‘control’ our choices and behavior.
We have never coined the term for such a flexible political entity as a Learner. We are nameless and therefore powerless because we reject better doctrine. We expect to muddle along somehow, despite our refusal to refine our political discourse.
Indeed, our constellation of political metaphors is a patchwork of obsolete buzzwords and rusty clichés that may have held some promise in the distant past, but none today. These mushy euphemisms (democracy, left versus right, capitalism, collectivist, phtui!) do nothing but worsen our errors and compound their ill effect. Politics-as-usual forbids us to tinker with the creaking boilerplate of civilization. This text notes this obstacle to progress and sidesteps it.
“These principles, therefore … are to be submitted to the
dispassionate and patient investigation … of those individuals of every rank
and class and denomination … who have become in some degree conscious of the
errors in which they exist; who have felt the thick mental darkness by which
they are surrounded; who are ardently desirous of discovering and following
truth wherever it may lead; and who can perceive the inseparable [connection]
which exists between individual and general, between private and public good!”
Robert Owen, Catechism, Cole, 205-7. Taken from The
Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1963, p. 128.
One cannot cheat at Learning, lie about it or avoid it. Bullies learn evil; victims, endurance; and progressives, if they’re lucky, patience and compassion. Everyone learns to do it better the next time. Learning is hard-wired into us, our favorite game. From conception to death (and perhaps beyond), our consciousness burns to learn.
The verb ‘to learn’ is missing its active voice, to supplement the passive one we’ve grown accustomed to. We need to upgrade its original intent, from ‘passively absorbing information’ to ‘exchanging information freely.’ “I learned to read … My school-marm learned me to read.” In addition, the term Learners, as understood here, includes the packet of information each of us requires to get on with civilized life. I claim my share of Learners and hope to trade it with yours.
The words ‘teaching’ and ‘education’ carry an overburden of compulsion and regimentation that has nothing to do with the ‘Learning’ we’re talking about here.
While the index to Theories of Learning – A Comparative Approach has many entries under punishment, conditioning and suchlike compulsions; there are no entries under “play and games.” Interestingly, the only reference to play occurs in the Preface, where the editors explain how much play they indulged in while they “worked on the problem” of learning.
Even though this book may address an unsuspecting mass of Learners (“Who, me?”) it seeks those special people who recognize the Learner within themselves, the instant they scan these lines.
Learners ! Rally here!
We are all born Learners; none may abstain. The body of Learners embraces infant and elder; rich person and poor; victim and tormentor; know-nothing, academe and self-taught alike. Age, race, sex, abilities and other identity issues are one and the same on the playground of Learning.
Once the Learners on this planet recognize each other and rally to their topics of passion in keeping with their talents and interests, the stars will be ours for the asking.
This text rejects straitjacket terms like Leftist and Rightist. I have met some decent, thoughtful conservatives. Believe me, I’ve appealed to far too many ‘progressives’ and ‘activists’ whose only commitment was to their dead-end prejudices and herd-like organization. I found many more people whose politics slid right off this scale.
The incompatible demands of weapon mentality empower multinational and interdenominational right-wingers, no matter how much the rest of us despise them. Don’t tell me that extremists like Slobodan Milosevic, the KGB and their historical replacements are ‘Leftists.’ They imitated all the tactics of typical Right Wing reactionaries. Essentially, they are interchangeable weapon managers. Most of us bear the talon-marks of these buzzards, as do our friends and family members overseas.
These days, ‘moderate’ reactionaries, ‘compassionate’ conservatives, shadistic liberals and mercenary radicals elbow each other across our TV screens. Each group lauds the peace content of its own position and condemns the weapons outcome of its adversaries. No one uses terms like ‘peace content’ and ‘weapons outcome,’ however. That forbidden vocabulary would make everyone’s inexcusable lapses and shared strengths all too obvious.
Learners will conserve worthwhile values, extend a liberal hand toward those less fortunate, and go to the (radical) root of social problems. I might even conclude that they would display reactionary revulsion—at renewed attempts to validate weapon mythology, for example. A more accurate political shorthand might replace weapon managers’ ‘fearful hatred’ with Learners’ ‘love without fear or reproach.’
Free enterprise is a precious activity in many settings; central planning is, in others. The so-called free market fosters central planning by corporations and centralized corporate welfare within weapon states. It is hard to witness those activities in their purest form, since the more they’re only game in town, the more toxic they become.
Any habit and institution that promotes honest peace should be acceptable; everything that blocks it should be marginalized. Peace benefits should be identified and magnified; weapons aspects, isolated and rendered vestigial. The same social winnowing should apply to every political dualism that so-called leftists and rightists have failed to resolve as long as they controlled the terms of debate.
Successful social transformation demands that rulers and ruled share a consensus—not dominance and submission. This can only result from near-universal consent among the well informed. Our orthodox constellations of political metaphors cannot describe this unheard-of consensus. This book calls it a Cooperative of Plenty on the material plane, Laocracy on the political, and the World or Virtual Agora on the intellectual.
Today, we submit to reductionist, hyperactive and hyper- (actually, semi-) rational humanism. In deference to this tyranny, a coalition of nation-states and multinational corporations oversees the most culturally isolated and politically neutered information proletariat it can engineer.
Every political party conspires to further this runaway despotism: from Socialists and Communists, to Democrats and Republicans, to Nationalists and Fascists, and then back around again. Reflexively, info elites shield their rice bowl in the weapon status quo, even though they take great pains to hide their primary motive.
Those who confront this Gorgon emerge as militant extremists, either of the Left or the Right. Every ‘revolutionary’ member of a proto-elite is imbued with the same weapon mentality as his tyrannical archenemy. He promises to confront orthodox violence with redundant threats of popular violence. He anticipates social collapse and plots to manipulate it—with no more success than his dead-end predecessors. Revolutionaries, crusaders and jihadi are good at only one thing: perfecting the next round of weapon technologies.
We live in an algedonic age. The real rules are the ones we least understand. Crucial social rules are neither discussed nor acknowledged by popular consent. They control a vast meta-system of warfare that doesn’t intrude into our lives until the lead slug, toxiplasm or gamma ray with our name on it crashes into us. Until then, we remain placid, more or less reluctant conspirators with weapon management.
On the other hand, Learners will sustain syncretism (“as the Cretans did”). They will identify failing institutions and then remove, reform or circumvent them. Everyone’s life-quality, sacred awareness, natural habitat and long-term profit will benefit.
We cannot sort these priorities effectively outside a Learner Commonwealth. Ranking them fairly requires everyone’s well-informed consent, which could only be obtained therein.
Greed, power-hunger, and deprivation/abuse/neglect fears will diminish under Learner administrations. Criminals, the obsessively rich and other parasites will grasp the true meaning of wealth and power, once they have let their primary fears subside. New benefits will outweigh old fears, thus diminish violence and untruth.
Those heedless few who persist in nurturing ancient evils will be caught up in social safety nets much more flexible, benign and secure than the makeshifts we rely on today: malign neglect before the fact, and compounds wrapped in razor wire, after.
Only by adopting Learner priorities – and subordinating lesser ones – may we expect real progress.
In the meantime, the best among us attempt to relieve specific social ills in a vacuum. No one person or group could hope to resolve any of these problems with a mere lifetime’s work; they seem so overwhelming.
Frustrated reformers obey the useless logic of scientific reductionism. They sub-divide one big problem into tidbits insignificant enough to seem workable and then pick the smallest of them to resolve. These weapon reformers seek compromise solutions by scavenging them from the discards of weapon technology. They are very careful to leave monolithic weapon technologies intact, lest fear-haunted elites forbid any additional improvement.
Independent groups of ‘morally superior’ beings perform this hopeless microsurgery in direct competition with other reformers for starvation resources. Their pecking orders resemble infighting among starving chickens. We’ve tried every variant of this tactic for thousands of years, despite constant failure. This behavior defines insanity: doing the wrong thing over and over again and expecting better results.
We must first topple weapon mentality from its pedestal; only then may PeaceWorld stand a chance of succeeding.
Anti-cannibalism, universal salvation, emancipation from slavery, constitutional rights, class equity, worker solidarity, sexual liberation and apartheid terminated: it’s amazing how many initiatives progressives have set in motion despite our human frailties! However, every time a mighty new ideal let some isolated group momentarily pry loose from weapon mentality’s grasp, regrouped weapon managers seized the next opportunity to ambush and scatter that peaceful consensus. In a weapon dominion, paradox, paralysis and political reaction attend every isolated lunge at progress, no matter how well-intended.
We are on the verge of an Ethical Revolution as staggering as the Industrial Revolution itself. We have endured weapon management for so long, we no longer grasp the sovereignty of peace—it has ceased to signify. We don’t respect or recognize anything any longer except aggression. Our societies are less and less able to handle any project except killing as many victims in the shortest possible time.
Weapon mentality has stacked itself steeper than its angle of repose; thus its eminent collapse is inevitable. This semi-pure Tao of Yang is long overdue for a major infusion of Yin.
In order to invoke peace mentality, we must manage the world under one roof, and that one peaceable. Each nation may attempt to protect its national sovereignty by sacrificing the wealth and children of its citizens; but this reflexive nationalism will enslave us all to weapon mentality forever.
This said, Normal Angell made a valid point about nationalism:
“However mischievous some of the manifestations of
Nationalism may prove, the worst possible method of dealing with it is by the
forcible repression of any of its claims which can be granted with regard to
the general interest. To give
Nationalism full play, as far as possible, is the best means of attenuating its
worst features and preventing its worst developments. This, after all, is the line of conduct which
we adopt [with respect] to certain religious beliefs which we may regard as
dangerous superstitions. Although the
belief may have dangers, the social dangers involved in forcible repression
would be greater still.” Norman Angell
(pseudonym for Ralph Lane) The Fruits of Victory, The century Company, New York, 1921, p.
246.
As long as weapons elites coordinate proxy wars between nation states and other Prism sub-aggregates – as they manage to do today – weapon mentality and its contradictions will condemn us to misery in the short term and military annihilation in the long run. National sovereignty and weapon management have never delivered peace for very long, no matter how painfully they were applied. Only world sovereignty could hope to sustain it into the foreseeable future.
“Two things should be obvious at once:
“…The peace of a political community is impaired by civil
strife of all sorts. Whether or not we
choose to call such civil violence ‘war,’ the fact remains that civil peace
cannot be regarded as perfect until governmental machinery is able to cope with
every form of dissension or dispute.
“The perfection of peace does not depend on the removal of
all causes for dispute or strife; nor even on the avoidance of force in the
settlement of differences.
It depends on ways of keeping quarrels on the conversational
level, and on a monopoly of the legitimate force needed to execute
decisions.” Mortimer J. Adler, How
to Think about War and Peace, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944, p 121.
Our weapons indoctrination teaches us to dread the prospect of one world government, (see the 1984 Syndrome). This idea makes us nervous because we have been convinced that the only workable alternative is dangerously impossible. At the bottom of our hearts, however, we loathe the current reality that allows Wimps/Prisms to lock us into global mismanagement—not the ideal of one elegant, global polity.
We have as much to fear from one world government as we would from a Mayor’s Office: benign or corrupt, as the case may be. In other words, we have nothing to fear that Learner vigilance could not handle in the long run. Just as conscience drafted and upheld the best legislation written so far, so could it guarantee justice, freedom and plenty for everyone under a global regime that excluded from power those deprived of it.
But I cannot leave it at that. We are here to clarify our ideas and render them more complex, not to simplify them.
The Bible and history reveal a fundamental contradiction. Let’s call it the paradox of the Tower of Babel. God interfered directly in the government of mankind on three occasions, (his anointment of Saul and David, and this one in Genesis 11: 1-9).
1. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be retrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
It’s strange how God intended to bind us to do what we feared and loathed the most: scatter across the planet…
Likewise, history teaches that every time a civilization reached heroic heights of inclusiveness, abundance and benevolence, some monstrous cataclysm destroyed it. Whether by plague, drought, volcanic eruption or a meteor-driven, all-season winter; some calamity befell every society that rationalized itself.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the same fate befell every other human aggregate, civilized or otherwise, as well as entire pre-human ecologies. It doesn’t matter that primitive tribes were much less vulnerable to natural disaster, until very recently, than more complex, stationary and vulnerable urban societies. We are interested in the fate of well-run civilizations and not of those whose disappearance was never recorded. Right?
So what choice do we have? We are confronted by a planetary civilization at odds with itself: vicious and arrogant because it is fragmented where it should be whole (in its peace technology) and holistic where it should be fragmented (in its mastery of weapons).
On the one hand, God forbids us to kill and Jesus forbids us to harm the little ones. We are supposed to love our neighbor and turn the other cheek to violence. The best way to do that would be for everyone to live under one roof and that roof a peaceable one, well regulated—in other words, on PeaceWorld.
On the other, the God of Genesis appears to have trained us like attack dogs to suppress our solidarity and replace it with enough viciousness to execute random mayhem with enthusiasm. The Book of Revelation appears to threaten with the Wrath of God anyone but Jesus who’d dare urge Peace on Earth.
Likewise, the natural world with its serial disasters that seem to focus in time and space on the greatest centers of civilization. Note the volcanic eruption of Thera that blew Cretan civilization away; the meteor showers that destroyed almost the entire urban fabric of the Middle Bronze Age, first, and of the Early Iron Age, a thousand years later – see Burning Libraries (BC) – and so on, recorded in history or not.
It would be difficult to record the destruction of your civilization if your last ten generations were utterly preoccupied with not starving to death.
So it must be up to each of us to decide what we want to do. Do nothing, sit on our hands and watch killer primates fatten themselves on helpless babes and the World Forest? Or stand on our hind legs and act like civilized beings? The former certainly looks like a safer one for the soul, and I am sure many moral cowards will cling to it. The latter is more tempting for those who find this barbarism intolerable… even at the risk of damnation by some red-toothed god—one in whose face I’ll gladly spit as its jaws closed on me.
Let me put it this way. Should planetary disaster befall us, its illiterate survivors will likely blame it all on our having come together and tried to turn this carnage around. No doubt the first literates among them will forgo scratching their fleas long enough to inscribe this solemn truth in the next set of sacred texts.
“Here is the holy post-script of nuclear winter. The peacemakers were horribly wrong. Everything was their fault and not that of us chroniclers, our predecessors or our militant disciples. Viking mayhem, fervently performed, is the only way to secure the blessing of God. Hallelujah!”
Isn’t that strange? A few passages in the first and last books of the Bible forbid world peace, whereas the remaining books command it. The Bible attributes every crime imaginable to man; but the only social decision that might reduce their impact—God forbids? Seems like an obvious textual revision by weapon managers.
All I can respond is this. Screw that. If God commands me to do A and then condemns my eternal soul for optimizing A, that’s His business. I refuse to be cowered into world war merely because some long-revered weapon text tells me to do so. Let the chips fall where they may; I will go on pushing for world peace. In my universe ruled by our God of Love, it will be those who refuse to cooperate with peace who will face God’s disappointment (God help them) prior to being saved in any case.
I have no use for a deity who can’t make up his mind what his slaves should do, and who condemns them to eternal hellfire for failing to satisfy his schizoid demands. I will do my best not to kill and not to harm the little ones. Let God make up His own mind whom to punish for His lack of clarity.
And you make up your own mind, now that you have these contradictions at your fingertips. All this impacted constipate has given me a raging headache…
Strutting Prisms lay out their weapon psychoses for anyone to see; they’re obvious. Subtler Wimps make stealthier antagonists. The epithet ‘Wimp’ should be political poison for any tyrant and tyrant lover. Beware of Wimps who call themselves Learners! Fortunately for us, Wimps betray themselves as follows.
Wimp elites consolidate political power to the loftiest, most centralized level they fantasize they can control. Their impulses are irrational and reflexive. They cannot tolerate the probing questions of public discourse that Learners would thrive on. Learning declines, even among children of the elite, despite endless micromanagement by remote education bureaucracies.
On WeaponWorld, skinheads in suits run atomizing weapon states. Political, economic and police terror extract submission from a disarmed citizenry. Mercenary brigades conduct security crackdowns with no check and balance against tyranny. ‘Non-lethal’ weaponry makes this reflexive terrorism seem less controversial even though more widespread and arbitrary. Democratic institutions become shameless facades for Conspiracies of Greed. While living standards may rise somewhat for a privileged few, poverty worsens for a growing underclass.
Torn from their land and deprived of legitimate livelihood, entire peoples become stateless pariahs hunted down like animals. Their desperate leaders accept token development aid and millions more to buy weapons. The UN Security Council, which rules on their legitimacy, is a private supper club for the worst weapon merchants.
Meanwhile, weapon dissidents nurse their sense of inferiority: a worse liability than any police repression. Every Learner’s passive acceptance of this disgrace strengthens weapon tyranny and weakens that Learner in direct proportion.
A few decades ago, corporate elites segmented the Earth into First, Second and Third Worlds—the better to chew it up. Today, Wimp elites plot to reduce the info proletariat into two groups.
1. The slaves: a gray mass of interchangeable cogs that over-consume and over-produce to meet the profit quotas of the info elite. Most of us shuffle along on this pathetic treadmill. We wage-slaves no longer suspect the main goal of our forced labor: we’re on permanent standby to arm the world for its next climax paroxysm of total war … whether or not that priority is rational. Otherwise, we can be incinerated or plagued in a few short weeks, along with our cities and extremely fragile food supplies.
2. The unpeople: unemployable, untouchable, invisible and stripped of rights … pour encourager les autres ("to motivate the others" us slaves). Voltaire wrote this about Britain’s quaint custom of executing any British admiral who sailed home in defeat.
For Wimps, human rights are a marginal concern at best. When civil rights and other ethical considerations clash with their weapon protocols, flagrant abuses are tolerated, promoted and officially approved. President Bill Clinton’s Administration specialized at this; his Republican replacements before and since, were even better at it. Good for nothing else, mind you, but military catastrophe for the nation and financial ruin for the masses.
As a fashionable dissident, you may have protested against the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, the World Village is going to need a well-regulated Bazaar to manage its global transactions.
What we should have protested (which no ‘activist’ bothered to suggest) is the weapon content of the WTO: its refusal to regulate military affairs to ensure global reconstruction and enforce the peace. No anti-WTO activist demanded these things during Seattle’s 1999 WTO police riot. It never occurred to them or to anyone else.
I was too busy with eternal rewrites of this book, and didn’t much care in any case for “social activism” as currently malpracticed. Besides, the few efforts I made fell on the deaf ears of local and global ‘activists’ as bossy as they were clueless about constructive alternatives. Those factors they got around to protest were, as usual, marginal peace requirements: more labor- and environment-friendly regulations. Weapons organizations like the WTO are sure to neglect them—at least until world peace is secured first and forces them to pay closer attention.
Meanwhile, as if by magic, giant peace dividends are poured down bottomless pits of financial scandal, weapon deficit, wars of aggression and corporate convenience, preventable disasters and handouts to the rich. That shouldn’t bother Learners too much. It just consolidates the funds needed to build PeaceWorld into fewer hands and among fewer decision-makers―fewer mid-level managers to be talked down from their sniper nests.
Insurance companies garner more and more profits by ejecting indigents, the unhealed and the mentally ill from their hospital beds. A century of centralized, IMF/Supreme Soviet-style mismanagement has nursed neo-colonial condescension towards despised Others. Similar thinking brought us the Titanic, Paschendale, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sahn, the Bhopal gassing and the Exxon Valdez disaster; it’s brought us Mad Cow disease and today’s forestry and fisheries sterilization programs. The World Trade Center demolition is their handiwork, systematically provoked but officially “unforeseen.”
A thick bundle of ecological disasters is lumped together under the term ‘global warming’ and thus handily dismissed. Some brave, carefully ignored scientists predicted the industrial influence of global warming since the 1800s. All they had to do was choke on Victorian smog and calculate its simple growth curve.
Industrialists shouted them down. As signs of global warming grew more spectacular and inarguable, those shouters got louder, more numerous and better paid. Their arguments resemble the deft maneuvers of a defeated army’s rear guard. They’ve fallen back on a succession of barely tenable arguments, claiming that the influence of human industry on global warming:
A. doesn’t exist;
B. is a statistical blip on a flat line of environmental stability;
C. is irrelevant to natural phenomena insufficiently explored and thus unaffected by man;
D. cannot be prevented economically;
E. is drowned in a flood of cosmic influences; and finally
F. repeat the above idiocies until you’ve convinced everyone to do nothing.
Given our leaders’ long history of “thinking the unsinkable for reasons of cost” (think of the Titanic, built on the cheap) and inducing mass misery among select prey, what political legitimacy can they claim? Only the blind submission of our apathy.
Shifting tornadoes of military violence land here, land there; they pause long enough to devastate communities, level cities and decimate entire peoples. Then – just as suddenly – they move on, with no one the wiser.
The media praise inept foreign relations and worsen our dread of new immigrants; they refuse to analyze world events for content and context. Blatant miscalculations and institutional failures are conveniently ignored. Without explanation, deadpan newscasters report shocking international atrocities as so many potholes on the superhighway of global morality. TV and movie dramas worship thugs and bullies we wouldn’t hire to sweep our sidewalks. TV and newspaper reporters have exposed our leaders as hypocritical buffoons. They’ve done that so often, we forgive them everything and don’t expect any better leadership. Newscasters have promoted their corrupt sponsors to the highest rungs of power… which must have been their main assignment all along.
If the rich and powerful are exposed and punished, it’s only because they pissed off richer superiors. Those superiors believe that a scapegoat must be thrown to the mob to divert its attention from their riper misdeeds.
Just follow along behind fictitious Indiana Jones or all-too-real George W. Bush, and catalog the infrastructure and lives they’ve wrecked. They both belong in the docks of Justice.
On Learner PeaceWorld, Administrative responsibilities will settle at the most local level to which they can be delegated, including police and self-defense functions. A well-regulated World Militia – of a type ignored in the United States despite its Constitution and practiced only in part in Switzerland and Israel – shall attend to local defense.
The larger the Learner organization, the more reluctant it would be to micro-manage local affairs. By constitutional decree and universal consent, World Government will limit itself in scope and, more importantly, in tax receipts. Reflexively, it will defer to lower levels of Administration that will benefit from much larger chunks of these receipts to deliver local services in well-balanced proportion. Most social problems will be handled at municipal, county and bioregional levels (as per Joel Garreau, in The Nine Nations of North America). Only the broadest tasks will be delegated to continental levels of administration; and only peacemaking, globe-spanning and extra-planetary projects will merit direct intervention by the World Government.
Learners will diversify ethnic and cultural inputs; they will reinvest in peace the enormous dividends we’ve wasted on the illusion of military security. They will turn political power, real security and Learning into constitutional rights. Schools will be rebuilt to honor these principles; (see “Education as Pathology”, “Laocracy”, and “Is Ecology Constitutional?”).
Info proletariats will absorb their elites and merge into a Learner Commonwealth. Unlike revolutions of the past, none of these transformations will require mass violence, oppression and destruction. No longer will populations splinter between well-schooled elites and dunce-head majorities. At worst, tiny info proletariats will emerge, composed of know-nothing extremists: ideological and religious fundamentalists intent on boycotting World Peace, and disability-illiterates. Nothing they do, short of violence, will diminish their common rights on PeaceWorld. Only diagnosed psycho- and sociopaths would be excluded from power.
Taking advantage of unheard-of leisure time and many more mentors than exist today, everyone will cultivate their topics of passion to contribute to a mighty Learner Commonwealth. A vast majority of self-taught entrepreneurs (“takers-in-between”, go-betweens) will replace tiny Conspiracies of Greed with Cooperatives of Plenty.
Learner civilization – fostering talent, not killing – will resemble the culture of Bali in its prime. Everyone will work dozens of temporary jobs interrupted by equivalent sabbaticals. They will live parallel, creative lives more crucial to their well-being and social status. Most people will hyper-educate themselves in their topics of passion. Spirit and science will become everyday norms of worship, and the arts will welcome every honest contribution. While science renews its expertise, popularity and findings, the sacred will resume its rightful role in commonplace reality, with the blessing of the scientific community.
This Learner Commonwealth will only coalesce once international majorities practice information politics on a daily basis and global scale, and once they earn enough political accountability to claim membership in the Learner Commonwealth.
With due diligence, small but vital minorities have as their topic of passion cultivated most of the peace technologies we require. Few essentials need be invented from scratch, though many more details will need to be dreamt up.
For the first time in history, Learners can pull fully serviceable, planet-spanning communication systems right off the shelf. This is the first time in history that peace has stood a chance at success.
Every past failure is irrelevant. We lacked the mandatory fundamentals of global communication, cosmopolitanism, commonwealth, and most importantly, the mass of fully briefed Learners. Prior failures at peace are not valid arguments to further delay it, but confirmations that it is just within our grasp.
PeaceWorld may seem impossible to us now: its impracticality confirmed by every page of our long and bloody history; but it will soon become a practical reality. Our only other alternative is annihilation … and we know it.
Today’s dollar democrats resemble the owners of the Palace Hotel before the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. Back then, San Francisco boasted one of the finest Fire Departments on Earth with more trained personnel than it hires today. The hotel was built sturdy enough to shrug off the actual quake; its design incorporated every new-fangled safety feature money could buy.
Unfortunately, other structures roundabout had not been as well thought out. San Francisco’s brilliant Fire Chief was among the first to die in the wreck of his headquarters building. Most of his boys were crushed under collapsing firehouses; so was most of his shiny new equipment. Water mains burst and gas mains exploded; the post-quake firestorm engulfed the city.
Seeking to impede the fire, poorly trained soldiers blew up block after block of buildings (including a big alcohol depot) using state-of-the-art dynamite and only succeeded in feeding the firestorm more fuel.
In an attempt to hold out the blaze, the Palace staff and parched firemen pissed away its high-tech emergency rooftop water supply—to no avail. The hotel was a total loss despite every precaution taken during its construction.
A quarter million San Franciscans lost house and home, including every mansion on Nob Hill. Dreading crashing property values, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce lied about the extent of the carnage. It reported 478 deaths when the smoking rubble yielded almost ten times as many bodies. 28,000 buildings were destroyed.
Just as the Palace Hotel was no more fireproof than the shoddiest tinderbox next door, so the rich of today are only as secure as the poorest of the homeless surrounding them. Everyone knows this. Irrationally, we paper over our apprehensions with gloating stock market projections. Yet we suspect, in our heart of hearts, that a Learner Commonwealth may be the only sanctuary we could reach in time.
At rare intervals, novel investment opportunities arise, as if from nowhere. A few entrepreneurs secure tremendous profits by turning some harebrained scheme into lucrative reality. The upcoming Learner renaissance promises more wealth than any growth phase in history, despite and perhaps because of the catastrophic exhaustion of our petroleum reserves and the perestroika-like crash of weapon institutions that depend on them.
Unheard-of abundance awaits us just around the corner, provided we focus on everyone’s quality of life—not just the quantitative, military parameters of national chauvinism. “How many battalions? How much firepower? Built and deployed how quickly?”
And never forget Mencius’ warning! Humanity and Duty always trump mere profit.
You have begun to grasp Learners’ intent and vocabulary. After resting awhile, proceed to another random page. Go easy, at first; this stuff is difficult. In the meantime, contact me. If you’ve come this far, I’d love to hear from you. Don’t be as shy as your predecessors were, along this path.
“There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work,
pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without
morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics
without principle.”
“Let me mention a few of the characteristics which I believe
that this psychohistorical development will come to embody… It will retain a ‘model of time,’ but will
expand this model into new concepts that combine and give more subtle
expression to man’s individual and collective feelings toward his past and his
future. It will evolve a genuinely
dialectical position concerning the interplay of man’s psychobiological nature
on the one hand, and his historical experience on the other – avoiding the
historicism of Marx (the claim that man is nothing but his history) and the
psychologism of early psychoanalysis (the claim that history is nothing but the
re-enactment of man’s psychological evolution).
It will retain Freud’s principle of the past as motor for historical
change, while at the same time taking account of that which is new in the
patterns which emerge from the three-way interplay of man’s psychobiological
nature, his cultural past, and the existing historical currents acting upon
him. It will similarly stress the
dialectic between the reality of external events and man’s unique need to
perceive these events only through some form of symbolic re-creation. In this way it will maintain the
psychoanalytic emphasis upon symbolic behavior, but broaden its areas of
symbolism beyond those of classical psychoanalytic theory… It will stress man’s innate need for
exploration and change as a fundamental element in the creation of his history,
as well as the countervailing tendency toward stability and stillness expressed
in Freud’s ‘Nirvana principle’.
“In all these ways, the new historical psychology and
psychological history – they may finally come to be brothers – can gradually
free themselves from two intellectual polarities which have all too frequently
dominated both historical and psychological work: first, the lingering Newtonian
legacy of the closed, mechanistic world of absolute cause-and-effect
relationships; and second, the intellectually nihilistic rejection of all
general principles or causative elements.
It will instead evolve a stress upon patterns and constellations whose
cause-and-effect relationships are the intricate transactions of elements
always in process.” Robert Jay Lifton, History and Human Survival: Essays on the
Young and Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary
Psychohistory, Random House, Inc., New York, Random House of Canada, Limited,
Toronto, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1969, 1970, pp. 296-298. [His italics].
The painful truth? For thousands of years, human culture has undergone Darwinian selection for weapon mentality. Wherever ancient societies matured into prototype peace technologies – or merely restrained their weapons obsession for the time being – nearby weapon hordes overran them.
Human history could be resumed as:
1. the gradual perfection of social and material tool kits that optimize contemporary weapon mentality and technology;
2. the discharge of this optimized technology in a climax holocaust limited only by the means available (like a gunshot while a pistol is being cleaned);
3. a Dark Age for humanity to recover from this paroxysm; then
4. return to Step 1.
The combination of weapon Christianity and Roman weapon technologies triggered a European Dark Age for the next thousand years; the same thing happened in China and Islam. This trajectory can be traced in the history of other civilizations, especially after periods later recorded as revolutionary.
This historic erosion of peace has bred an unconscious contempt for it in each of us and especially in our info elites. With our silent consent, they have restricted peace technology to the limit of the info proletariat’s endurance. This eroded peace triggered the next paroxysm. That one, nurtured by all of us through this historical process, promises a planetary Dark Age even more durable and perhaps permanent.
Books were very rare and fragile things before tough, cheap paper and printing presses made mass literacy commonplace. Millennial cults (consecrating a chosen text like the Bible for a thousand years or longer) required basic schools and libraries, and an educated priesthood to run them. These priests required safekeeping from armed hordes more concerned with loot than learning. Sooner or later, those hordes cut down the guards and breached the gates; after which, the priests had to persuade them not to suppress this unique text—that preserving it might lessen their terror and satisfy their lusts.
“In principle, the opposition of church and state can arise
even within a single polity…
“A number of systems can be envisaged within which the
sword-wielders and script-users are distinct, and within which the latter,
notwithstanding their lack of countervailing physical force, can share
effective power. In any one single
encounter, there is of course no question of any equality of strength: he who
has, and knows how to use, the sword, need brook no nonsense from the penpusher, and is indeed most unlikely to tolerate any
opposition from him. To understand the
manner in which penpushers nonetheless can and do
effectively oppose and overcome swordsmen, we need not invoke or overestimate
some mysterious power of superstition in the hearts of the swordsmen which
would compel them to bend their knees to the upholders of legitimation and
truth. We need only look at what happens
when both thugs and scribes are enmeshed in a complex, overall social order …
“The main point about the loose and fluid congeries of lords
of diverse rank is that they are indeed loose and unstable. There are diverse reasons for this. For one thing, they are prone to conflict and
warfare simply in virtue of their pervasive ethos: violence is their honour, their specific skill, and they are in effect
required to demonstrate, almost perpetually, their competence at inflicting and
resisting it.
“There are also other reasons. The balance of power which keeps the peace
between thugs and coalitions of thugs is unstable and unpredictable. The power of a lord high up on the scale, of
a king in effect, depends on how many lower-level thugs he can mobilize. The availability, the “loyalty,” of a
lower-level thug will in practice depend on his private assessment of the
strength of the king, and so, indirectly, on the lower-level thug’s assessment
of the loyalty of other low-level thugs.
They are all tacitly watching each other …
“The alignments in these conflicts, given the ambiguities of
loyalties and the unpredictability of outcomes, tend to depend in large measure
on the legitimacy of contestants – which helps floating voters, or rather
floating fighters, to decide whom to support. … This
in turn gives considerable indirect power to those who, through a mixture of
literacy and ritual competence, possess the near-monopoly of
legitimacy-ascription. They may be
bureaucratic office holders of the unique organization linked to revelation
[Author’s Note: half these examples are Gellner’s and
the other half are mine, none of them are categorical -- the Catholic model and
that of primitive churches], or members of an open class of scholars who alone
can decide upon rectitude of social and political comportment by comparing it
with codified divine rules [recent Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and Confucian
models], or they may be hereditary members of a caste without whose ritual
services all social conduct and status loses its legitimacy [the
model in India, also of ancient Judaism, and also the western classical period
(Greek/Roman)]. The pen is not mightier
that the sword; but the pen sustained by ritual does impose great constraints
on the sword. It alone can help the
swordsmen decide how to gang up to the greatest advantage.
“It is in this way, generically speaking, that social
elements other than military ones interact with brute force on something like
equal terms…” Ernest Gellner, Plough,
Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1989, Collins Harvill, London, 1988, pp.
94-99.
Our millennial texts have been the chosen reading of a long line of pirates and murderers. A hundred generations of more and more prominent weapon mentors have rewritten sacred texts and revised holy doctrine to suit the conflicting demands of weapon mentality.
If a peace society produced nothing but pacifists, that would make it rich and creative, grateful to God, exuberant, argumentative, law-reliant—and extremely vulnerable to military aggression. Weapon societies are good at nothing but hostilities; they fear their warrior God and claim their religion or ideology is the only acceptable one.
Sorry, folks. God exists everywhere and in everything, including God’s multiplicity and non-existence. Every God of every religion provides an equally valid and equally inadequate description. There’s no stepping outside to take a smoke break from God; neither is there a specific God 'superior' to the rest. What a ridiculous and typically human prejudice!
Especially based on successful murder! You have got to be kidding, just before you murder me, like all my predecessors who branded you and your fanaticism insane.
Such warrior societies lose the capacity to feed and care for themselves without plundering less warlike neighbors for slaves, rations, laws and other peace assets. But they can’t last very long as such. Longer-lived societies must carefully balance peace and weapon content, yet favor weapon management to defend themselves against all comers.
Thus, the most useful peace texts and discoveries disappeared a long time ago, feeding some frenzied auto da fe (autodafay, “act of faith,” inquisitorial pyre). Selflessly, endlessly, isolated peace mentors have preached their own (and their society's) destruction at the hands of itchy-fingered battle elites—both at home and abroad.
Historians have a scant, carefully censored inventory of ancient records to go by. The best documented of ancient literatures have a destruction rate greater than 99%: the Roman, Greek and Chinese, for example.
Less than one work in ten survives, from less than one in ten authors. The only remnants are scrawls of uncertain provenance: ancient written lamentations mourning forgotten authors and vanished masterpieces, marginal mention of great libraries disappeared from China, Santorini, Phoenicia, Ionia, Carthage, Egypt and Kushan (see Burning Libraries (BC)) and of apocryphal collections from cities small and great, reduced to dust, ash and submarine silt.
It is interesting to note that the oral histories of primal societies might have stood a better chance of surviving the efforts of militarily superior literate societies to suppress them. It is easier to destroy rare text collections and murder a literate minority of info elites, than to silence the recitation of epic myths by tribal grandparents, aunts and uncles, to rapt children gathered around humble hearths.
On a blank, hypothetical world map, the space-time geometry of ancient warfare registered as a shifting rash of red spots (pointillism) representing isolated crimes, raids and tribal skirmishes wherever population densities forced such confrontations.
A little later, the geometry of global massacre grew somewhat more elaborate. From the invention of metallurgy until the Industrial Revolution, these blemishes merged into red ribbons of death: the march routes, siege works and battle lines of armies (in a linear geometry). Flowing death zones throbbed by land and sea from the 1700’s Enlightenment through the World Wars (intermittent planes); modern Air-Land battle eats its way across entire subcontinents (a spherical plane). Meanwhile, the initial irritation thickens and swells as universal crime; chicken pox turned smallpox.
Historically instantaneous, near-certain death – planetary omnicide – would spread out during a nuclear/scalar/biochemical disaster (a hollow sphere).
If we let our weapon technologies fester much longer, a carefully brewed nanoplague could boil the biosphere down into its component organic molecules, or a sun gone nova might constitute the next stage of man-made catastrophe (in a solid sphere of annihilation).
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has studied the adrenal-fueled, fight-flight-posture-or-submit reflexes that allow us to cope with mortal anxiety and exertion during brief intervals. In return, they demand a few days’ rest to vent nightmares, verbalize stress and restore one’s mental equilibrium.
Unlike cliché war movies during which one weakling cracks and the other martial actors carry on with grim determination; 98% of veterans bear a blank, ‘thousand-meter’ stare after a month or more of combat. The 2% of battle elite exceptions turn out to be immune to combat stress; they’re aggressive sociopaths to begin with.
Modern combat’s psychic and trauma casualties would reduce a conventional military unit into a rabble cowering around it shot-up and supersaturated medical unit, actively raided by lunatic commandos—within a month or two of the onset of total combat. Recall the grinning conscript POWs of Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
Sounding the alarm, Professor Gabriel concluded that new drugs are being (have been?) developed, that would separate a soldier’s cognitive awareness from its emotional seat while sparing his sensory coordination, alertness and sleep cycles. Combatants on this type of drug would become well-coordinated and alert versions of a car driver taking Valium: racing down the highway at 120 miles an hour, intellectually aware of the danger but cut off from it emotionally.
These drugs would skyrocket combat lethality, war crimes and veteran reintegration problems. After their predictable spillover into underground drug markets, our world would assume a nightmarish, TV-like tint of cold-blooded criminality. Unlike real life, where crime and brutality lurk in the shadows while peaceful normalcy prevails, they would come to dominate our lives; just like they manage to, nowadays, in the media and during warfare. Unless we criminalize warfare soon, weapon technology threatens to chase us with bloody knives into our living rooms.
There is a direct correlation between military terror and child abuse. The more warlike the people, the worse treated their children. Shi Huang Ti, Alexander, Romulus and Remus, Genghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, Frederick the Great, Stalin, Hitler ... all these ‘great’ warlords were abused children.
Imagine the hells common children must have endured if their Princes were so afflicted. Picture the horrors today’s infants must endure, tender offspring of history’s deadliest weapon states.
A population that undergoes worsening military stress throws off more and more abused children whose tragic gestations and pathetic childhoods set them up for the next paroxysm of perpetual world war.
Famine- and terror-induced orphans from prior wars staffed many secret police agencies; they grew up to become fanatical and merciless guardians of the State. A point George Orwell made in Animal Farm. Cambodia, Aids-riddled Africa and entire nations elsewhere fester in like manner, as we sit here discussing it so comfortably.
Like suicidal fools, we are breeding the next generation of desperate terrorists bent on destroying the world. They’re more than willing and fully equipped to do so, thanks to our oh-so-clever weapon technologies and fashionable apathy: the ultimate outcome of our weapon indoctrination.
A brief decade from now, the means to plague entire cities and nations will replace the puny AK-47s and suicide bombs they use today. If we had taken care and fed them properly, with due empathy, we could have secured a more auspicious harvest than their grapes of wrath.
Military academies and English Public Schools (private boarding schools in no way limited to England) mass-produce weapon technicians. Harry Potter fantasies aside, Public Schools on the British pattern offer a slavish, authoritarian environment. Emerging from them, cunning battle elites may obtain a crude but certified training that open many doors to power.
First year (Plebe) cadets at West Point were interviewed about their politics. Four years later, the small minority of cadets that had called themselves liberal (in old, progressive sense) had disappeared: extra-familial hyper-discipline at work.
Political extremism, and perhaps even conservatism may reflect human stresses endured during childhood, adolescence, and even past lives; (see the reactionary as ex-carnivore). Over generations, criminality and militarism have reinforced each other through the systematic abuse of children. Psychic repression during pubescence may be most telling, like the social advantages of taller stature.
The Japanese are famous for the tender solicitude with which they nurture their infants, the calculated ferocity of adolescent competition and the command-controlled brutality of their armies in the field. Yet that abuse was always directed from above. During some wars, like the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the Boxer Rebellion, Japanese soldiers were renowned for their self-control and discipline; likewise, no doubt, in modern Iraq and Afghanistan. During other wars, they went berserk without provocation and committed acts of barbarity under orders, which their opponents found disgraceful.
Charismatic imperialists were usually humans of excellent character, burdened, however, with very hard childhoods.
The better most children are treated, the more peaceful, anti-violent and cooperative their grownup societies become (to the point of anti-competitive communalism), and the faster their psyches crumble when confronting ‘civilized’ warfare. The main weakness of primal (so-called ‘primitive’) societies is the routine affection with which they raise their young. Such tender youths don’t stand a chance against bands of ruthless aliens systematically abused as children, who ritually select the most abusive among them to lead.
Only after several tribal generations have been abused and massacred in this manner, only then will ex-primal tribes begin to mistreat their own children, from a desperate, subconscious need for collective security. Unheard-of wife and child abuse, organized crime and intoxication emerge, as does a steady stream of cold-blooded super-warriors. But the heart of the tribe has been ripped out.
Our PeaceWorld heart has been ripped out. Grow it back!
Lax childcare satisfies a wholesale requirement for military killers. During the pressure-cooker socialization of school and military basic training, children fortunate enough to be well raised get ‘reeducated’ by young bullies and petty adult tyrants. Taught to imitate the worst role models, kids spin off into arrogance, ignorance and aggression. Some of the brightest youths nurture this abuse into adulthood, when they may achieve incredible wealth and power. The leftover settles for petty delinquency, jail and/or the military.
“Military leaders, too, put their shoulder to the Big Wheel
of reproduction, for obvious reasons.
First, because they can never give up the customary idea of ‘big
battalions’. To that end, they crave
hordes of young children and are ever greedy for more. They consume them avidly, Providence willing,
and thus require an ample stock. What’s
more, they know that population pressure and above all overpressure induce
aggression, imperialism and violence.
Driving people into war becomes child’s play. This is why governments apt for belligerence
begin by legislating for more procreation.
Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert, favored bigger families by decree, once
his boss aspired to warfare. Germany and
Italy favored more babies in 1933. The
Japanese government published a law in 1941 that forced men to marry by 25
years of age, women by 21, and couples to have at least five children.
“As soon as the pressure cooker of state builds up a head of
demographic steam, leaders declare that the nation has too many mouths to feed
and that it must have more space or it will explode. They rarely favor the latter alternative;
they prefer the former. Hence the Gauls
embarked upon their expedition into Germania under Sigovese,
and under Bellovese into Northern Italy; hence barbarians invaded more fertile
and less populous lands during the decline of the Roman Empire and the
beginning of the Dark Age; hence the teeming Japanese sought diversion in
conflict with Russia; hence fascist Italy was driven to conquer Ethiopia. We could find many more examples.
There is a remarkably clear-cut relationship between warfare
and demography. At first, the military
machine insists on population growth; soon there is a surfeit of young people
and the nation begins to exhibit more and more forceful belligerence. Warfare breaks out and leaves a more or less
large dent in the population. However,
since the most warlike people are also the most vital and fertile, losses are
soon made up and the population swells once again...
“Birth rates, as shown above, have grown beyond
measure. On a global scale, we need more
and more murderous wars.”
Translated from Jean Bacon, Les saigneurs
de la guerre (The Warlord Bleeders) by Presses D’aujourd’hui,
Paris, in 1981. This work was published
in Tokyo in 1983, in England in 1986 and republished by l’Harmattan
Editions in Paris in 1995. Phébus published a third French edition in 2003. It was also published as The Greater
Glory,
Prism Press, San Leandro, California, 1986, pp. 116-117. This book should be required reading in every
Intro History class.
Occasionally, pre-historic population densities grew beyond sustainable limits (especially on the plains of Central Asia, seat of the most warlike tribes in history). Population controls (notably infanticide and protracted nursing), as well as limitless new lands (a ready escape hatch for wise underdogs) kept most primal populations below population densities so irritating that they triggered genocide. If not, family-based, semi-static tribes confronted equivalent adversaries. Under those aberrant circumstances, elaborate battlefield rituals evolved to limit martial violence. Primal battlefields offered bored bucks (whether Celtic, African or American Indian, the same logic applied) a symbolic stage upon which to dramatize their heroism and martial skill.
For example, counting coup – being the first to touch an enemy – brought greater honor than killing anyone. Harming non-combatants brought disgrace. The ritual suicide of non-combatants became the subject of epic mythology (whether among Amerindian tribes or Roman victors—Massada). The first death or mutilation drew ritual combat to a close.
Since television did not exist to let them wallow in shadistic brutality, they sometimes tortured prisoners as an indoor sport. More often, they passed prisoners of war through brutal hazing initiations, and the bravest survivors were adopted into the tribe to make up for its losses. Genocide was rarely practiced except in extreme cases of overpopulation and resource depletion. A conspiracy of women, shamans and druids was responsible for terminating this kind of conflict; nowadays, no one is authorized to do so. How sophisticated we’ve become!
We ‘modern people’ consider genocide a sad necessity. In order to fill the most battalions, modern societies boost their birth levels well beyond overpopulation redlines, and industrial planning ignores ecological sanity. Higher body counts among foreigners turn out to be a mythical boon, (dead men, women and children, interchangeably). The infrastructure collapse of some foreign country just seems to reduce global rates of pollution, at least for a while.
Counting coup has become irrelevant, and martial individualism is forbidden in military training … yet still highlighted in our entertainment.
Today’s omerta (code of silence) holds equal sway in public and private speech. Careless parents and school guardians teach children: your tormentor is not necessarily your worst problem, but the next level of higher authority that places its convenience above justice. This sorry habit, too, emerges from the disinformation politics of weapon mentality.
We pay for it with a flood of 'unconfirmed' massacres, unacknowledged disasters and unintended consequences. No one is held accountable, rewards for wrongdoers exceed their punishment, and everyone worsens the damage.
Once the Routine of Evil dishonors the law, (confirms the corruption and/or incompetence of orthodox sources of control), personal ‘respect and honor’ take over, shifting us another step further from harmony and justice. Civilized people find no social grace in the champions of such ‘respect and honor.’ On the contrary, we reject them. After all, their ‘high status’ feeds on raw terror induced by bloody acts of revenge.
Some abused children-turned-adults mistreat their own kids in turn. They justify this reign of terror as obedience training. There is just such a scene in the movie, Red Dawn. A broken and gulaged father sends his son off to fight the oppressor: “This is why I was so hard on you! It is too late for me now. You, go out there and avenge me!” Very dramatic and very common among mankind. The heroes of this movie could just as well have been black African, Oriental or South Asian and Middle-Eastern Muslims; and the bad guys, Western corporate aggressors.
The weapon dynamic remains the same. Now-dominant armies evolved because their soldiers were defeated and then adapted to their defeat; defeated nations will develop ‘victorious’ armies in the future. Strategic victory and defeat are no more permanent or morally significant than the reverse sides of the fat coin I just spun across my desk.
Initially unheard-of, then scandalous, then discouraged, then merely unfashionable; public bullying, lynch mobs, gang warfare and clan feuds become ‘honored’ institutions. Multiplied and thereby trivialized, casualties assume the function of a scorecard; scars born and the number of people hurt add up to personal worth. For millennia, we’ve lived for little else. This pattern holds true in ancient China, Medieval Europe, ante-bellum South Carolina and contemporary ghettos. Race, income and other prejudices (that we obsess over) are secondary if not irrelevant. The only necessities are over-dense populations, sub-employment, abused children and a vacuum of legitimate authority.
Any deviation from this norm reduces the number of willing killers a society may call upon in times of war. What results is military devastation. Traumatized survivors then resume the abusive pattern. This pattern of abuse – abuse relaxed – assault – abuse resumed, renders irrelevant considerations of moralistic right and wrong, especially when they are posed out of context. It is only on PeaceWorld that we could hope to foster valid ethics without paradox.
Unfortunately, morally bankrupt authorities (and the savage proto-elites that challenge them) reject peace management. Legitimate or revolutionary, weapon mentors invoke routine weapon myths to justify their customary abuses.
Human freedom is inalienable. Everyone is born, lives and dies in freedom’s cool shade. Not because it was written into some constitution, not because some government enjoyed a rare good mood this decade, or even because some Prism proclaimed, “Look, Ma! I’m a freedom fighter!”
Humans are whatever they wish to be. They never ‘earn’ their freedom; they are born with it—even though a few misguided power-addicts may hand over an illusion of freedom to satisfy some secondary craving for security, authority, money, drugs, ‘belonging’, etc.
Immortal freedom won’t emerge from its hiding place until the fighting stops. Anyone who claims to dole out of freedom, monopolize it or defend it militarily – like some horde of gold – enslaves himself and anyone who listens to him. Battle elites hide their predatory habits behind paradoxical weapon myths.
Every time these insights have emerged, weapon managers did their worst to obliterate them, like baiting and squashing a pesky bug. They used some combination of bread and clubs, bribery and terror. With morbid consistency, weapon managers worsened social stress. Once their stress has been ratcheted up to unendurable levels, long-suffering proletarians turned to proto-elites to germinate a new political membrane that might shield them from alienating authority.
Weapon leaders tend to push back hard. Proletarian revolt is usually hesitant; crushing it appears to sharpen state power. History demonstrates, however, that ‘internal security troops’ rot out; they become scavenging bullies worthless in actual combat. Thank God, or we’d all be corpses stacked in concentration camps by now. Just as solid ice, if were not miraculously less dense than liquid water (unlike most other molecules), would permanently fill in all the hollows.
Allowed free reign, today’s Wimps orchestrate civil wars, political repression and international bullying at gunpoint; these combine to rot out entire nations. As it stands, international gangsters prowl the planet unchecked. Armed to the teeth, thanks to our taxes, and exempt from effective prosecution, they’ve mastered all the dance steps of prodigal brutality.
Only the three-way alliance of a one-world government, its allied court and universal militia could defend us against them. At last! Those criminals would be officially declared pariahs. Every hand would be turned against them and their sponsors, whether corporate, religious, ethnic, private or governmental. We could create new jobs for them on PeaceWorld, just as dramatic and dangerous, but a lot less destructive.
In a weapon technology, info-proletarians are turned into individual isolates engulfed in economic phantasms beyond their understanding and control. The slightest mischance slings us through threadbare social safety nets, into joblessness, homelessness, squalor and criminality. WeaponWorld shreds ageless extended family structures and thousand-year habits of homegrown subsistence. It rips apart meaningful relationships among individuals and their friends, families and peers—even ‘belonging’ to the land itself. It forbids the very idea of belief in anything significant and turns us into cowering credophobes too scared to believe in anything.
Families are fractured into bare ‘nuclear’ minimums—then beyond that into single parenthood, bastardy, institutional fosterage, runaway homelessness and roguish isolation. Almost all the nations and tribes to which we should owe natural allegiance are forbidden. Alone, helpless and cast adrift in a hostile world, info proletarians abandon their tradition, culture, autonomy, faith and hope.
These sacrifices satisfy corporate magnates, agro-monopolists, vicious absentee landlords and showboat, megabuck project managers who gobble private freeholds to satisfy their insatiable portfolio demands. The only tribe on Earth that remains legal is the global one of the rich.
Any interest rate beyond 5% is usury that must induce unnecessary suffering in someone—however well veiled. International and local bureaucrats compound this tragedy in return for a steady paycheck. Meanwhile, slums and prisons mushroom across the planet.
All that would be formally prohibited on PeaceWorld; its managers, disgraced and ejected from power.
If individual isolates become ensnared in unjust laws, so much the better! Each new injustice grants weapon managers another hold over their lives. Once our personal despair and self-loathing are complete, we become useful cogs in the war machine. We mistrust everyone and everything except our own weapon managers and their life-and-death manipulations. We realize that they are hopeless creeps; and, in rare cases, that we’ve become too scared to believe in anything. But we go along with their scam anyway.
Learner peace technicians will challenge these assumptions and reverse them. With full public approval, they will sponsor economic interdependence, mutual interests, common politics, reverence for extended family intimacies life and the gentle despotism of communal livelihood. They will cocoon everyone in a complex web of personal obligation and reward; encourage personal self-expression, public health and withdrawal from misery. In direct defiance of five thousand years of cultural history, they will take deliberate and self-conscious steps to promote peace and forbid war. Admission into these kinship groups will be cheap or free, and departure easy.
In a Learner future, most sociopaths won’t suffer enough neglect and ostracism to act out their aggression. Imbued with the fundamentals of peace, our societies will leave far fewer sociopaths untreated, and grant much less power to the cleverest among them.
Type 1 sociopaths cannot control their pathology; they are unmistakable. Type 2 sociopaths learn to postpone their most blatant misdeeds; they only proceed when they know that no effective resistance will be raised against them. Today, it is they who run this entire planet, in the dumb name of weapon mentality.
Sexual predators will be identified and treated, long before they corrupt the next batch of helpless youngsters. Power-mad sociopaths will be cozened with therapeutic theatrics, taught the value of selflessness and drugged, if necessary, into serene complacency. All diseased individuals of this kind will be identified and carefully nurtured from birth to death. Thus will they cease to threaten us so frequently and so awfully.
Such therapies will become topics of passion for gifted Learners of psychiatry. Once we stop idealizing stoicism and social invisibility – if only because our clumsy communities cannot handle anything more complicated – psychoshamanic researchers will develop drugs, therapies and novel religious rituals to reconnect emotionally sick people with their feelings. At that point, violence will become a public health problem: a regrettable epidemic to be addressed one-on-one and institution-into-instrument.
We could defuse the worst effects of human violence in one generation. The sins of our fathers may have revisited us unto the seventy-seventh generation, but the promise of redemption through love is ours to fulfill today. It is a sacred obligation we neglect at our peril. Learners shall buy off, monitor and predict most acts of violence, both personal and collective. They will mitigate the worst consequences of crime, whenever, wherever and however it evades their control.
The following quotation includes another weapon myth and its clarification:
“Our Western vision of society—as a Hobbesian [author’s
note: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan] contract, consciously entered into
primarily to ensure harmony, offers no way of explaining the existence of
family bonds, of lifelong friendships, of the sense of cultural membership
afforded by shared language, and a thousand other precious things. Indeed, it totally misses and even denies the
deepest requirement that characterizes our species – the need for social
identity. Hobbes’ notion that without
society, humans would be at each other’s throats in a grand free-for-all is
totally right, but for completely the wrong reasons. He assumed that isolated human beings “in a
state of nature” would naturally destroy one another because their supposedly
innate competitive drives would lead them to do so. What Hobbes failed to realize – and many
still do today – is that humans evolved with a desire to belong, not to
compete. Biologically, we are obligatory
social animals, wholly dependent on a supportive social structure; and it is in
the absence of such a support system that destructive, ‘inhuman’ behaviors
occur.” Mary E. Clark, “Meaningful
Social Bonding as a Human Need,” in Conflict: Human Needs Theory, John Burton,
ed., Macmillan, Ltd., London, 1990, p. 40.
(Italics mine).
Compare the number of Olympic competitors each year, with the number of spectators who share their equally passionate participation in this spectacle.
If monsters surge from the gloom when our social conventions begin to fray, then more angels might materialize once we redouble our social bonds.
The Hobbesian cartoon of humans as calculating beasts at war with one another, only happens once we abandon the nurturing habits and cultural accommodations our sanity requires. Hobbes’ obscene pantomime occurred to him during the Enclosure Movement, when British info elites stripped the countryside bare of peasants and cast them into urban hells, eventually to provide Queen Victoria with more cheap riflemen, whores and industrial labor.
We subscribe to the same fallacies, wreak the same havoc worldwide, suffer from the same failure … and wonder (very briefly) what could have gone wrong?
Instead, we should build up a Learner Commonwealth and put all this misery behind us. With a little luck and a lot of determination, we could turn this whole thing around in a single generation.
We have been taught that there were only two World Wars, both during the 20th Century of the Common or Christian Era (CE). More weapon mentor lies.
Wars are not momentary aberrations the weak shun and the strong shut down as soon as possible. Instead, World War is self-perpetuating. An unending string of military paroxysms is only interrupted by shortened episodes of lesser violence to rearm, replace casualties and readjust alliances. Soon after, perpetual world war rekindles. To be more accurate, World Wars I and II should be called the Great and Greater Paroxysms of perpetual World War.
At the moment, we are girding our loins for the ultimate paroxysm, instead of offering up PeaceWorld to God.
Many conflicts have wracked the ‘known’ world, while slightly less regimented humans murdered one another with undocumented abandon. During the 18th Century, along with a climatic optimum and corresponding population surges, ‘Enlightenment’ wars raged around the world.
Indeed, any significant climactic change triggered human attack reflexes. Those for the better exploded runaway population density; for the worse, depleted resources. Either way, warfare broke out once again.
During their metastasis and self-destruction, prior empires wore themselves out to achieve devastating casualties we moderns induce with push-button ease. While disease and starvation scourged ancestral combatants even-handedly; we mix machete-swinging ethnicity with mine-sowing pseudo-ideologies, and inject additional starvation and epidemics on command.
In a thousand years, horrified archeologists will dig up more blade-split, club-shattered, bullet-, starvation-and disease-riddled skeletons from 20th century mass graves, than we discover in ancient digs.
Some ‘advanced’ civilization we turned out to be!
Nation-states at war follow an aperiodic cycle, a chaos equation, a Morse code of alternating war and pseudo-peace. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy concluded that America undergoes a social revolution – almost like clockwork – fifteen years after each of its wars (in Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 128). A Learner response to the latest mayhem may remedy our knee-jerk, Reaganoid reaction to prior debacles—or not. Bushoid/Obamanoid policies have merely refined our mass paranoia and subverted the Constitution.
Every military age-class has just enough time to wreck its golden youth in war – win, lose or draw – and settle down. Recovering or not from the crippling aftereffects of combat, they inculcate in their offspring the same lunacy they were raised on, and then send them out to be shredded in turn.
Often, a pandemic of ultra-violence seems to infect entire peoples. Almost every society has grappled with every other it could reach. All of them conducted ‘World War’ as deliberate foreign policy.
At one time, Chinese Emperors drew their palace guards from a remote colony of Roman legionary slaves, received as tribute from the fierce Parthians. The Parthian empire stood between Rome and China, both of which fought and bartered with them and their ancestors through the ages.
Go anyplace where fertile soil, plentiful minerals or sacred ground (worse yet) have drawn humanity. There, in dirt at your feet, you will find traces of human blood spilt in organized violence. The artistic and reverential Neanderthals (whose brains were larger on average than ours) were hunted off the face of WeaponWorld. This Earth is pockmarked with the lapsed remnants of civilizations murdered since.
“It is important to recognize that all wars are holy wars,
not because of theological banners that may or may not be flown, but because
the flowing of blood and the ripping of flesh consecrate the ground in the
oldest and simplest sense we know. To
kill and die on the battlefield, to mutilate and bleed, brings one before the
dicing table of the gods, where luck and skill and courage combine to name the
players definitively. Some will be
chosen to play again tomorrow, some will be wounded and scarred, and some will
be mutilated beyond recognition; but all have been gathered in the presence of
the most real thing, to know and be known with the utmost clarity in an
orgiastic festival of generosity and hatred.
Where else can one find the opportunity to employ one’s deepest
energies, so hedged and constrained as they are by common purpose? Where else can one freely offer them up to
the gods to whom they so manifestly belong?”
Dudley Young, The Origins of the Sacred: the Ecstasies of Love
and War,
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 224.
Libraries, great and small, have attracted mass destruction—from ancient China and the Near East, to Dresden, Tokyo, Beirut, Amritsar, Sarajevo and Baghdad. Knowledge is power. Mass killing becomes easier once enemies have been blinded and rendered mute. (See Burning Libraries (BC)).
Aryeh Neier wrote from the sniped rubble of Sarajevo, Bosnia, for The Nation magazine (May 3, 1993, p. 585). He concluded that a new pattern of assault was emerging: not targeting a specific prey population and its identity politics, as one would expect, but urbanity in general.
City dwellers develop a basic set of survival skills: cosmopolitanism, tolerance for strangers, broad-mindedness and a walk-a-mile-in-his-shoes attitude. Reducing tension becomes an ingrained habit among strangers who share a city—in short, they become urbane.
No need to lock your door in a truly healthy community. Disappeared Babylon, where no front doors had to be locked; the freedom of the world’s forgotten great grandparents. Abundance and justice brought about by humanity and duty, as predicted by Mencius. No need for devastating technologies; perhaps a keen interested in the best of them and their peaceful application…
Enraged weapon sectarians (usually rural bigots and small town thugs) call for remedial doses of genocide, anytime these urbane reflexes imperil their stunted prejudices. They brand as cowardice any civilized attempt to reduce their common dread of the Other.
Magnificent cities – renowned for their commerce, piety, brilliance and hospitality – have been ravaged in recent years. The short list includes Jerusalem, El Quneitra, Nicosia, Belfast, Hue, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Jolo, Kabul, Beirut, Tehran, Baghdad, Herat, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Kuito, Ngiva, Monrovia, Grozny, Kigali, Oklahoma City, Mogadishu, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City, Baghdad, the cities of Palestine, and New York City. Many more were targeted for this kind of destruction. Forgive me if I left out your war-torn hometown.
Alas, this all-too-human prejudice is nothing new. Chaosism – the deliberate infliction of ignorance, destruction and suffering for their own sake – may constitute weapon managers’ penultimate goal. Nuclear, biological, scalar and/or nano-biochemical omnicide would be their ultimate masterstroke—assuming we let them get away with it.
Maturing weapon states may burden themselves with elaborate and pauperizing arms industries. Nonetheless, it will take them years to maximize weapon production, well after all this grandpas and child soldiers has been marched off to die. Battle gear built during peacetime is obsolete when most needed. Yet every government stockpiles expensive and obsolete weapons – and deeds them to foreign nations in shady foreign aid schemes – to subsidize domestic weapons industries during peacetime. Thereafter, these cast-me-down weapons rip up poorer and poorer countries: those least able to afford their upkeep and the wreckage they induce.
Defeated nations often win these technological arms races. Since their obsolete hardware was destroyed, their brand new equipment is state-of-the-art. They tend to adopt the most modern weapons and lethal foreign tactics. On the other hand, victorious generals often prepare for the last war and thus lose the next one.
Every weapon government adopts at least a dormant weapon technology. In so doing, it attempts to deter takeover by more aggressive neighbors. Somnolent liabilities instead of emergency assets, these vestigial technologies atrophy, then bloat. They become pretexts for elite corruption, political repression and excessive taxation. We info proletarians feel compelled to exploit short-term profits, usury, environmental and workforce lunacies to pay off all those weapons overheads. Thus are we predisposed to revolt.
Instinctively, weapons elites pump up the level of social stress. If no valid reason exists to do so, some bogus Cause can be found. Class privilege; economic shell games; race, ethnic and religious prejudice; meaningless cultural controversy; private drug use; faith, magic and hysteria: the more trivial the controversy and the more intractable it seems, the better.
Contending political leaders order up double rations of factional bloodshed and police shadism. Any stupid excuse will do. The silliest Prism antagonisms are cultivated, shelved for a while, and then dusted off at leisure. Smug bullies can always be recruited and managed with much less effort than the rare, charismatic peace leader. Entire societies revisit the consequences of repression (unforeseen, as usual).
In Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, 1997, Dr. Roy F. Baumeister depicts three attitudes people take towards the social evils they share.
First off, that of victims. They magnify the harm done to them, their perfect innocence, and the bestiality of perpetrators whose ancestors, descendants and imitators are cackling demons of evil incarnate.
The gleaming-eyed psycho who delights in his victims’ pain is a narrative cliché, but rare on the ground. Most concentration camp guards and suchlike vermin were just stupid, lazy slobs who couldn’t find better jobs in the sickly economies their beloved Leaders worsened deliberately. This common myth – demonizing perpetrators of evil, their kinfolk and communities – endures though centuries of vendetta, magnified by cultural memory and reinforced by claims of prior victimization.
Second, evildoers attempt to erase the public’s recall of the harm they’ve done. Creative explanations – both rational and irrational – justify much of the evil they do. Prior victimization figures prominently. Perpetrators find some way, any way to shrug off their painful sensations of shame, and ward off criticism after the fact. Their reflexive reaction is to guard against a pricked conscience.
“Nothing much really happened. Their accusations are gross exaggerations. Everything that did happen was beyond our control. Someone else gave the orders. Besides, they deserved what they got.” Sound familiar?
The third attitude is perhaps the most important: that of onlookers. Many of them react with studied, passive indifference, concluding that their interference could not influence outcomes—except to earn them the role of next victim. On the contrary, the slightest interference by random onlookers makes most perpetrators hesitate; it gives their victims a momentary chance to defend themselves and slip away.
Every witness of evil should grasp this basic truth: he protects himself best who obstructs it fearlessly and without hesitation. Learners shall broadcast this lesson assiduously, while info elites tend to suppress it. “Let the authorities handle that!” while they look away or lead the pogrom.
My own experience as a common witness? I must admit that I’ve trivialized the suffering of victims I have observed, more often than the perpetrators have. I am therefore guiltier than them in the long run. And my turn will come next, with no one to shield me.
When unthinkable acts are committed with official sanction, every survivor bears a share of guilt. According to Antjie Krog in Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (p. 123), German theologians formulated four categories of war guilt after World War II:
· criminal guilt for hands-on killers;
· political guilt for politicians and their supporters who hired the killers;
· moral guilt for those who hated the killers but did not resist them to the death; and
· metaphysical guilt for the victims who survived.
Few German war resisters survived; the Nazis hunted them down mercilessly. I suspect that many more Germans resisted than those publicly admitted. Honest folk (both in and out of uniform) grew so fed up with sick Nazi games that they gave themselves away. Disposing of them, their families, their friends and paperwork would have been child’s play. The Nazis’ options were numerous: random firing squads, the camps themselves, assignment to ground zero in burning German cities, or one-way tickets to Penal Battalions on defeated fronts.
Those few who resisted were fed to nocturnal blast furnaces, like reluctant crickets lost in a cloud of loyal moths. Flashing sparks in a night sky filled with sparkling sacrifices. Genuine Learners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance
It is a shame that so few monuments remain to honor their memory, in Germany or anywhere else. This world should be dotted with stone and bronze monuments commemorating every personal interference with tyranny. We require that inspiration.
I recall a bronze statue of a ragged American
infantryman cradling a starving child in his arms: the heroic apotheosis of
American intervention during World War “Two.”
This is an example: http://christianjstewart.zenfolio.com/bw/h29275cfb#h29275cfb. (Image link provided courtesy
of Christian J. Stewart Photography).
That ideal should become an icon of universal wisdom; its antithesis, as unacceptable as cannibalism.
“The
systemic decay of a military-industrial society is a phenomenon of
counter-modernization—an abrupt reversal of the key developments that have
characterized all industrial societies to date.
This form of social degeneration was provoked in the Soviet case by the
anti-innovative aspects of the economic system coupled with the
self-destructive character of its military-driven modernization. The system’s devolution can be factored into four
interconnected processes: technological stagnation and declining productivity;
decline in the complexity of social structure and the stagnation in the
division of labor; the system’s inability to develop new needs, beliefs, and
values – all necessary for progress; and finally, waste of resources and
ever-spreading ecological damage.” After
Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building; the Soviet Union and the
Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, Edited by Karen Barkey and Mark Von
Hagen, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1997, p. 81.
The text above is Victor Zaslavsky’s after-the-fact explanation of
the Soviet Union’s collapse. The same
criteria apply to soon-to-collapse Western gerontocracies almost
identical. According to him, the
collapse resulted from the Soviet Union’s inability to assimilate native
majorities in Central Asia and unwillingness to turn its military technologies
into peaceful alternatives. Learners predicts that Western societies
will soon undergo the same collapse because of their inability and
unwillingness to embrace foreigners in a peaceful, global cooperative, and
their “Après Exxon, le déluge” (adapted from the Louis XIV quote: “After
me, the Flood.”) refusal to promote massive research in technological
alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels a) rapidly running out and b)
likely to parboil the biosphere. Unlike
the Soviet Union’s crash, there will be no compensating foreign aid or global
vitality to cushion this catastrophe.
Let’s look at another weapon myth. It asserts that
the Scientific Method evolved from alchemy: a systematic attempt by
sophisticated Learners to convert base metals into gold. This anal retentive fantasy turned out to be
a great waste of time and money for cunning charlatans and their willing, royal
dupes. Even if such a transmutation were
workable, collapsing gold prices would render it worthless.
Even more obtuse: the alchemist’s search for an alkahest or
universal solvent that no container could hold.
Other items on the alchemical wish list include:
·
Homunculi (“little men”). Why bother?
·
Palingenesis: the restoration of plants from their burnt
ashes. From this fantasy, it might seem
but a short step to restoring life from death.
·
A Spiritus Mundi, which dissolves gold and triggers other
magic.
·
The Active Principal or Quintessence of Elements. Sounds like a great way to rekindle the Big
Bang. Who would volunteer to survive
another Big Bang?
·
The ultimate alchemical absurdity would ensure human health with a
potable liquid gold called aurum potabile—another
worthless ambition.
One key difference between Hell and this Earth is our opportunity
to live well, die well and reincarnate in Christ. Weapon
management's crowning triumph would be to immortalize our richest tormentors’
senility. It would also be obscene
vampirism as long as so many people went starving. Ditto, 120-year life spans while some
populations average a quarter of that.
How can the rich allow themselves such evil?
I would not criticize these hobbies, (extracted from Manly P.
Hall’s encyclopedic The Secret Teachings of All Ages, The Philosophical
Research Society, Inc., Los Angeles, 1977, pp. 154-55), if they did not take so
much irreplaceable time and talent from our foremost tasks: namely, making
warfare illegal across the planet and restoring world peace. I’ll never get over the open range of trivia
people distract themselves with, otherwise.
I am fascinated by alchemists’ insistence that their earthly
formulas are one of four separate formulations.
To take effect, all four must occur simultaneously on three spiritual
planes and this earthly one—or so they believe.
Once Learners resolve our problems of warfare and peace-fair, we
may turn turnips into marigolds or earn big bucks to chase a ball across a
playing field―obsess over it, if we wish.
We may pursue our topics of passion without censure, wherever they may lead. However, the last five thousand years of
human hyperactivity leading nowhere are a disgrace for every Learner. Lost little children distracting themselves
with trivial games.
Long before alchemists, weapon technicians practiced ‘the
scientific method.’ They used inductive
and deductive reasoning, trial and error, repetition and confirmation of
results, the extraction, refinement and admixture of standard elements into
consistent compounds, and other clever laboratory tricks.
The first scientific applications were for military technologies. More and more demanding, higher-energy
weapons (and even harder weapon-making tools) were smithed from available
materials: bone, limestone, flint, quartz, copper, arsenical copper, bronze,
iron, steel, stainless steel, uranium, plutonium, titanium and ceramic/plastic
composites―mostly to make more and ‘better’ weapons.
When digging in the Earth, one conclusion comes to the
surface. Weapons define the Stone,
Bronze and Iron Ages; they define the Pyrotech (fire) Era we are crossing at
full steam, and the Biotech (life) Millennium charging into view. This new era may last less than a generation
if we're not very, very careful.
Otherwise, our survivors may have to go back to chipping radioactive
rocks―assuming any living thing will have survived our unintended
consequences, beyond, maybe, weeds, cockroaches, and deep-stratum bacteria
…
I feel no need to reincarnate as a deep stratum bacterium – the
closest ecological niche I can imagine to biblical Hell – and re-evolve in endless
agonies into something approximating human awareness. No more so as a glowing-stone-chipping mutant
primate(?).
Just imagine, in a future devoted to peace, living awareness might
evolve into something as superior to humanity on WeaponWorld, as it would be to
deep stratum bacteria! Though the
contrast between these realities may just be a question of scale and marginal
details, nothing more…
We have finally emerged into the Biotech Era because scientists
have finally taken biological weapons seriously. For a science to become ‘hard’ it must show
some promise as a new source of weapons.
Weapon technicians have produced the most sophisticated, durable
and expensive inventions: hunters’ and warriors’ state-of-the-artifact―as
they have always done. Weapons have
always been crafted to rigorous standards of excellence, used the most
challenging, hardest and most hazardous materials available. Weapons have been more revered than idols and
hoarded more greedily than treasure, squandered during military spending
sprees. The most refined of them have
been named and cherished in large numbers and given more care than many
throwaway children.
The social status of ironsmiths versus that of warriors has long
fueled scholarly debate. Tyrants
enslaved the best smiths to make more weapons.
Weapon smithing was an arcane craft imbued with religious, mystical and
magical overtones. In Africa, ancient
smiths held a magical status, for better or worse.
For example, red-hot blades of the finest steel were bathed in
fresh human blood drained just beforehand from terrified human sacrifices. Quenching these blades in heavily oxygenated
hemoglobin (liquid carbon) produced the ‘finest’ sword steel, you see. Apparently, this method produced enormously
strong and flexible carbon nanotubes, like those found in Damascene sword
blades made from ferrous ingots of wootz:
a special ore that retains certain trace elements. This at least according to an article from Le Monde, currently archived and
therefore inaccessible to me. See
Google: wootz.
The more technicians, equipment and cash available, the deadlier
the final product. Warrior chieftains
had to reward their smiths royally, yet keep their craft a state secret. Thus, “alchemists.”
So tell me: modern science is supposed to have evolved from
alchemy, and not from some unmentionable weapon technology, right? That transparent lie is taught to every
schoolchild without exception, duly memorized and repeated by each of us, no
matter how peace loving we may call ourselves.
Taught deliberately, mind you, to hide the absolute sway weapon
mentality holds over our cultural norms, and its technology holds over all the
stuff we own. The devil’s greatest
triumph resides in convincing the whole world that he does not exist.
How many more lies, just as vicious and absurd, has weapon
mentality crammed into our skull? How
much more noxious junk will weapon technology foist upon us―when we could
have perfected the jewelry of pure peace technology instead? Just how clueless are we? Read on.
In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford discussed the
technical influence of miners and mining.
He was indeed correct. To make
weapons, smiths required metal ore; to pay for them, tyrants required gemstones
and precious metal. Siege warfare was an
elaboration of primitive mining techniques.
The first steam engines – and later on, the first reciprocating ones –
pumped water from flooded mine pits.
Poor peasants became familiar with bolt-action rifles long before
they saw a light bulb, picked up a fountain pen or straddled a flush toilet;
even though these novelties were invented around the same time.
In our supposed civilized age, we spend titanic sums on the arts
and crafts of war. The USA just spent
fortunes it could ill afford, to develop the latest fighter-bomber
variant. This space-age wonder will then
be launched by the squadron, flown by million-dollar-trained pilots, against
the world’s cheapest infantry.
According to Stanley Kubrick, we could have launched a manned
spaceship to Jupiter in the year 2001.
He wasn’t a stupid man; that feat may have been entirely within our
means. Instead, we chose to send three
hundred fighter-bombers and a Commando Division to Afghanistan. What intellect, what creativity, what
genius! I ask you.
Or just look at a simple handgun.
It is a thing of chilling beauty, superbly crafted for manslaughter
alone. Manufactured en masse, it
can be priced dirt-cheap or handed out "for free." People can get paid to use it, instead of
having to earn an honest living. Note
also the circuit-guided munitions of this Silicon Age, and military satellites
boosted into high orbit to direct them unerringly.
Yet we find nothing wrong or strange with any of this. Our killer ape habits have merely grown more
convoluted. Killing is the first human
activity that embraces complexity—and just about the only one at which we are
consistently good.
Warfare is stupid by definition, no matter how technologically
complex we make it. It demands that we
suspend disbelief in its ultimate outcome, demands magical thinking. Peace is much more cerebral and complex, no
matter how unachievable we may make it seem.
A second forerunner of science was ceramics: at present, a spacey
military technology. Given the male
chauvinism that prevails today, it may seem tempting to dismiss pottery, basket
weaving, textiles and cooking as trivial, female pursuits. Yet potsherds and remnants of the hearth are
reliable indicators of ancient cultural achievement. The more creative and receptive the cookery,
the more dynamic the civilization. What
could be more ephemeral than a meal?
Despite the patriarchal arrogance of recorded history, real
civilization appears to revolve around the kindred arts of medicine (especially
midwifery and herbalism), carpentry, washing and therefore plumbing, plus
cooking; followed by the psychic/religious/entertainment permutations of
divination, storytelling, astrology and geomancy. Those epics we ought to be reciting around
the campfire (read the mass media). Ancient
skills that gradually decayed into our weapon religions and ideologies. We have cast aside ancient wisdom in the
newfound blindness of our scientific positivism. “I am a certified scientist, and, as such,
positive you are wrong—no need for proof!”
A third ancient source of science was animal husbandry: at first,
the breeding of hunting dogs, then of food animals, chariot mules and
warhorses, among other domestic species.
Many adult farmers and adolescent naturalists took up botany and zoology
as their topics
of passion. Such in-depth peace studies attracted much
more Learner curiosity in realtime than alchemists’ putrid alembics, though
much less in the historical record.
We, sorry to say, rely on the booty ledgers of greasy warlords to
sort out our past.
For all we know, gene splicing may have been a prehistoric,
mortar-and-pestle cottage industry.
Sorta like Mendel and his pea-pods, but thousands of years prior. All you’d really need would be some kind of
magic potion to strip the cell wall from its nucleus and core DNA—then lots of
patience. You could study your results
by microscope pretty fast, or by crossbreeding organisms into their macro scale
capacities. As they say in genetics,
phylogeny. This would take more time and
require generations of hereditary human vocation, clan-craft and priesthood to
chronicle experimental results for ongoing analysis.
Then again, earlier species of animals or insects, and perhaps
other hominids, may have made observations on microscopic scales and performed
quicker analyses. The smaller the
species, the likelier its vision would penetrate microscopic scales and speed
up this analysis. What else would they
need? Some intra-species chemical
communication system? Insects (and
especially microbes) are experts at such.
Any land or amphibious species could have exploited the magnification of
water droplets, or some lens-making plant might have served. Nowadays, these plants are extinct. But in the past, plants could have grown
blisters as organic lenses to magnify solar energy, and some other species
could have benefited from them.
The seeming uniqueness of human intelligence and communications,
and the inferiority of other species past and present, are prejudices not
supported by evidence sufficient to confirm or deny.
Learners must never underestimate the genius of life and the
crushing pressure cooker of evolution’s selection over time. Let us humbly study them instead,
anticipating greater depths of complexity and startling feats of ingenuity, no
matter how sophisticated our science becomes.
We should mime it as minutely as possible. In that sacred worship, in that unconditional
love like that of a small child for its parent, humanity’s survival may be found. Meanwhile, our understanding of life is as
clear as mud: just sufficient to try to destroy it. We should know this, at least.
The scientists of today won’t rush to humanity’s assistance (the
way we expect them to, disappointed on a daily basis), until they embrace some
ideology more fitting than flatulent certitude, sneering nihilism and academic
narcissism. They lack sacred wonder, and
are the lesser for it.
For a fixed fee, chosen scientists can make deadly evil look promising,
cloak grand larceny, engineer mass misery and turn off valid alarms. They’ve done little more for two centuries,
compared to what Learner scientists could have accomplished in their
stead. Given enough grant money,
distinguished doctor-professors may affirm that social incompetence, pollution,
warfare and ecocide are cryptically beneficial, unavoidable or “insufficiently
studied—let them continue nonstop.”
Ego-driven public quarrels can paralyze scientific communities that
might otherwise be immune to outright corruption.
Like seasoned prostitutes, professional scientists serve
Conspiracies of Greed: the only topics of passion that weapon states tolerate. While some hookers may have a heart of gold –
and many scientists, ethics adamantine – it would be unwise to entrust our fate
to their care without extensive popular supervision.
Might this wisdom not be sophisticated enough to appreciate the
complexities of science and oversee it effectively? This would be the fault of information elites
and their ridiculous academic protocols, much more so than of popular
wisdom. We could throw this train wreck
into reverse in one generation.
The IQ exam is our crooked yardstick of brain smarts; it was first
developed to sort World War I conscripts.
Nowadays, its results are used to dignify racism, especially in works of
anti-genius like The Bell Curve.
“It is a truism that all of the wars drive forward science
and technology. As many historians and
philosophers have asserted, weapons always preceded tools. The first machines were battering rams and
catapults. The oldest profession in the
world is not the usual one of prostitute, but that of smithy turning out
weapons. The first roads were strategic
paths; the first canals served a military purpose. Credit emerged from financing mercenaries,
and surgery developed as a result of military campaigns during the 19th
century.” Translated from Jean Bacon, Les
saigneurs de la guerre, Éditions l’Harmattan,
Paris, 1995, p. 139.
Such luminaries as Archimedes, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Cervantes,
Dürer, Descartes, Lavoisier, Goethe, Eli Whitney, Somerset Maugham and many
more, made their reputations as soldiers, spies, fortification engineers,
armorers, military industrialists, reporters and bureaucrats: the main career
paths of a weapon civilization.
Roman Legions were some of the first factories, producing loot and
slaves on an industrial scale (according to Marshall McCluan in Understanding
Media).
Time and motion studies first rationalized the thrust and parry of
swordplay, then the thirty-odd steps it took to fire a clumsy harquebus
(primitive shoulder cannon)—long before factory tasks required such
analysis. Diderot’s Encyclopédie, upon which the Enlightenment was grounded, was a “How
To” of primitive heavy industry; in other words, of weapon technology. The Blanchard Lathe, the premier design tool
of modern industry, was first used to machine-sculpt standard wooden stocks for
Kentucky (Jaeger) Rifles.
All the political transformations our historians hold dear: from
tribal allegiance, to city-state (whether Tyranny or Oligarchy), to empire, to
royal domain, to ‘representative’ democracy, to today’s corporate/industrial
military slave market, were outcomes and accelerators of weapon technology.
The first assembly line using interchangeable parts wasn’t the
Ford Motor Company in the early 1900’s; it wasn’t the Springfield Federal
Arsenal, where rifles were assembled from nearly interchangeable parts for the
American Civil War—under the tutelage of Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame. Much earlier, as far back as the 2nd
Century BCE (Before Christian Era), Chinese arsenals were turning out crossbows
by the hundreds of thousands. These
eventually evolved into cut-down, repeating crossbows with twenty-round
magazines and twin barrels, (i.e.: pre-gunpowder semi-automatic pistols). Their industrial tolerances would have
rivaled those of Civil War percussion locks.
Their influence on a swordplay battlefield, just as lethal.
During the 15th Century CE (Christian Era), the first
metal reduction gears were painstakingly carved from bronze ingots to create cranequins:
ratchets used to cock state-of-the-art crossbows.
Yet the Antikythera mechanism, raised in 1901 from an ancient
merchant ship that had gone down in the Mediterranean, lets us presume that at
least a few workshops and technicians could do this kind of high-precision work
at least two thousand years earlier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism.
Also, some of the oldest world maps in existence trace the coastlines of
Antarctica and the Americas with a precision inconceivable at the time. Barring, perhaps, brand new navigational
charts from the great Chinese fleet.
Around the same 1500s, the Arsenal at Venice set up a canalized
assembly line to provide reserve squadrons of bare galley hulls with equipment,
rigging, armament, provisions and crew—at the rate of one ship per hour for
days on end. Venice had to send far off
for good naval timbers; it had already razed local forests, by the early
Renaissance.
Every oar-and-sail naval power executed the same mayhem against
the World Forest. Imagine the great
forests chopped down for imperial fortifications and galley fleets!
Iron smelting required that hardwood trees be turned into charcoal
by firing cordwood in a low oxygen environment, and burning that charcoal in
high-temperature kilns along with iron ore.
Entire forests were leveled around kiln sites, and their waste products
polluted the soil and inhibited forest regrowth.
In 1997, one of America’s last great trees was cut down to re-mast
a rotten naval hulk commemorating the War of 1812. Nowadays, some businessmen earn tidy profits
by cannibalizing old buildings for their precious, mainframe
timbers. Mature, fully developed tree
trunks no longer exist—except in a few sanctuaries in the deep forest that the Bushoids/Reaganoids haven’t yet
gotten around to devastate for profit.
What a scandal!
Venice’s military power lasted until its Arsenal blew up under
fishy circumstances, permanently removing that great city from the roster of
first-rate powers.
The most spectacular advances in ship design and navigation arose
from war fleets. World War II amphibious
assault craft evolved into container and Roll-On-Roll-Off ships. Only weapon technicians could raise the funding
needed to develop ships’ end-castles, multiple decking, full rigging, steam
boilers, screw propellers, iron plating, gas-turbines, submarine hulls and
nuclear reactors … Not to mention aircraft and all their attendant ironmongery.
“A great fleet also needed complex and expensive shore facilities. A dockyard meant not merely large stores of timber, cordage, sails and blocks, with storage space for them, but also sawpits, a mast pond where the valuable tall pine trees which made the best masts could be seasoned, a tar kettle, a pitch house and perhaps a ropewalk, as well as dry-dock facilities. A great naval base was the biggest productive enterprise of the age …
“It was, however, in the naval dockyards that the effect of war demands in fostering the growth of big and complex units of production was most clearly seen. These dockyards were large employers. By 1697 the English ones had over 4200 workmen, and this figure was considerably exceeded in the Spanish Succession conflict … But naval dockyards were also places in which a number of different processes had to be combined to produce the most complex artifact of the age, the large sailing warship. Not merely shipwrights and carpenters but smiths, caulkers, rope makers, sail makers and others had to contribute to this process. By the 1740s the more than fifteen hundred employed in the dockyard at Deptford were classified in thirty-one different trades. Moreover there was a marked seasonal rhythm to this work. In wartime there was a peak of demand in winter, because large ships did not normally keep the sea after September or October but instead returned to port for repairs and maintenance in preparation for the next summer’s campaign. In peacetime the position was reversed and more work was done during the summer months. This combination of size, complexity and seasonal variations posed problems of a kind which no other industrial enterprise of the age had to face. It demanded a skill in planning and controlling the flow of work and in handling sometimes difficult labor relations which was called for nowhere else. It stretched the administrative capacities of the age to their limits …
“By the 1740s the British navy needed each year 12,000 cattle and 40,000 hogs to supply it with meat alone; and the Victualling Commissioners owned breweries, bake houses, slaughterhouses and a wide range of storage facilities. They were, in fact, running the biggest business in Britain, probably the biggest effectively integrated one in all Europe; and the need for careful planning was intensified by the fact that as time went on, a bigger and bigger proportion of the fleet was likely to be thousands of miles from its home bases …" M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime 1618-1789, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, England, 1998, pp. 142, 143, 152, 153.
The Manhattan Project was history’s greatest technological
development effort up until then. Its
workers handcrafted humanity’s first atom bomb.
Other countries have called this ante about a dozen times, since, to home-brew atom fission weapons in furtive
secrecy. Hydrogen fusion weapons
required much more filth and wastage, this ante raised by every other venerable
weapon tyranny.
Imagine this level of research devoted to rational population
control and elegant life-support. How
unrealistic of me to suggest such a thing!
Learners shall insist on it. At
present, breakthrough civilian technologies are at the mercy of the ‘free market’―a
code phrase meaning corporate suppression of valid small business and
strangulation of peace technologies.
Team sports ritualize infantry drill, especially among the
young. Sports statistics clutter
billions of minds, as well as the media tasked with feeding those minds. Precious airtime, print space and academic
funding, wasted on a glut of sports statistics of zero significance.
Yeah, sure beats learning anything useful!
The best journalists cluster to sports journalism. This says three things about our culture:
·
How much we distract ourselves from important matters by not
publicizing them enough;
·
How much we make the trivial seem important by publicizing it too
much; and
·
How much talent and effort it takes to turn the millionth random
mesomorph’s billionth stylized muscle contractions into interesting
reading.
Many fine journalists get well paid to turn the flight of an
inflated ball into musical prose that millions of readers read avidly every day
(even if that’s the only thing they read, those millions, all day long). Meanwhile, I get
paid nothing to butcher my prose muttering about World Peace, as if it were
nothing. We are crushed under a
wide-screen technology of monologue sports babble—day in, day out, in every
public space. But let no one speak of
Peace!
Those are our rotten priorities.
Feel guilty and repent.
Michael Murphy’s text, The Future of the Body: Explorations
into the Further Evolution of Human Nature collates endless sports
anecdotes to demonstrate meta-normal human talents. He ignores wartime equivalents.
Each of us can recall the wizened old gym coach who urged us to
never give up, never quit, never become a quitter. If you think about it, every crime
against humanity, every massacre, battle and war was started and drawn out by
grim people who refused to quit gracefully, even after all reason and common
sense had bled white from their motives.
In any case, the ultimate political power of women resides in
their veto of male initiatives before they have gone off the deep end. Behind every successful man stands a woman
sharp enough to advise him to quit while he’s ahead. We ignore this warrant at our peril.
There was a time when religion was “the opium of the people” (per
Carl Marx). Nowadays, professional sport
is their heroin—and advertising, their crack cocaine. Homelessness and malnutrition fester
unattended across the planet, yet our cities vote themselves quite costly new
sports arenas. Wise commentary is drowned
in sports babble while everything worthwhile decays in venerable silence. Sis, boom, rah!
In The Evolution of Civilization, Carroll Quigley described
the steady deterioration of college football―from sunny afternoon frolics
between study-dazed frat brothers, into mercenary confrontations of Byzantine
complexity, steroid-soaked doggedness and Mammon lucre. A fine illustration of institutional decay
and bloat over time. For extreme
examples of this madness, look to soccer riots.
The El Salvador-Honduras Soccer War, that Ryszard Kapuscinski described
so tellingly, was a shocking prelude to the Salvadoran civil war, that Ronald
Reagan fed cluster bombs to so assiduously.
The British Admiralty commissioned the first exact chronometers so
its admirals could locate themselves at sea.
The land battles of Frederick and Napoleon were more ‘sophisticated’
than their predecessors, because their company commanders could consult a good
watch and get from point A to point B on schedule. The first maps, compasses, celestial
navigation and global positioning technologies served similar purposes.
Cartesian geometry first described the trajectories of cannon
balls, not those of planets. Those were
priceless predictions, later refined by trigonometry, calculus and Newtonian
physics. You can’t build an atom bomb
without Einstein’s formulae and those of quantum physics; even though those
weapon dogmas contradict each other and even though they require that 99% of
the Universe be made up of nothing we can see, called Dark Matter and Dark
Energy. Talk about pseudo-scientific
mumbo-jumbo!
The first telescopes weren’t built to satisfy the stargazers of
Galilean mythology. Instead, they served
as spyglasses so rich generals could oversee their massacres from hilltops and
church spires, tucked well in the rear with the gear.
High-energy industries first evolved to cast and bore out
cannon. Most church bells were cast by
civilians and then melted down by tyrants to make more cannon. In perfect irony, European Protestant iconoclasts
dismantled many church bells so that their Catholic nobility could buy them up
cheap, melt them into cannon and gun them down.
Lewis Mumford speaks of cannon as the “first reciprocating
engine.” He mentions preliminary
attempts to motorize vehicles using gunpowder as fuel. From page 81 to around page 101 of his book, Technics
and Civilization, he reviews the influence of warfare on technology.
“Anderson wrote,
“Thus in England Henry Cort began his experiments on wrought iron, which culminated in the ‘puddling’ process of 1784, largely to achieve a higher quality of metal for the production of guns and anchors for the navy; later the Admiralty would accept only iron produced by his methods. The development in 1774 by the industrialist and inventor John Wilkinson, of the cannon-lathe, the result of a decade of work in the production of artillery, made it possible to bore reasonably accurate cylinders and thus did more than anything else to make Watt’s steam-engine a practical proposition.” M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime 1618-1789, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, England, 1998, p. 182.
The British engineer, Bessemer, produced steel from iron and coke
(coal vacuum-cooked to purify its carbon content) for military ordnance. Stainless steel was a top-secret military
invention in 1917, during the First World War.
Its first civilian application wasn’t capitalized until 1928, per
Buckminster Fuller.
Public Relations didn’t become ‘respectable’ until a flood of reactionary
cash engaged copy-write barkers to shout down the American Progressive
Party. Thus were Americans pressed to
join the First World War: the least popular of America’s many unpopular wars;
at least until Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; and those to follow, of corporate
convenience.
“The more democratic a state, the more unpopular its wars.” Machiavelli, The Prince.
Public Relations experts made sure that the Spanish Influenza
pandemic of 1918 would become a footnote in the history books, even though it
killed more people, during the last year of World War I and the year
thereafter, than did four years of bloody combat. There were such staggering fever casualties
that the authorities censored all reporting of them. It was named the Spanish Flu because Spain
was neutral during the war, and its Press could report the pandemic without
censure. By striking down mostly young
and fit adults, it exhausted everyone’s manpower reserves and thus ended the
War to End All Wars. Otherwise, there
was plenty of institutional stupidity left to prolong indefinitely the World
Bloodbath we call Number One.
The 1918 Armistice came as a great surprise to soldiers in the
trenches. They believed there would be
nonstop trench warfare for at least another generation, until all of them and
their sons had been murdered. Both
side’s leaders had lost so many of their own children,
they couldn’t force themselves to back down.
Indeed, Allied armies were shipped out to invade Soviet Russia
immediately after the 1918 Armistice with Germany, until they mutinied en
masse and demanded to be sent home.
Or, in the case of British and American troops, their mothers and
political allies demanded it. A French
battle fleet sailed back home from the Black Sea, manned by mutinous sailors
sickened by their bombardment of civilians, every officer locked below.
Finally, Public Relations professionals quashed the idea of World Peace ,as President Wilson had articulated and for which the
whole world yearned. Peace was not
profitable enough for a new generation of weapons industrialists, their
stay-at-home lackeys in Congress and serried ranks of combat-virgin weapon
mentors who had taken over academia, politics and the media during the
war—while their betters marched off to die in it. An equivalent cabal of chicken hawk,
draft-deferred and sociopaths took over American politics after Roosevelt’s
death at the end of World War II. They
have never let go since.
The first computers were used to plot the targets of naval
gunfire, flak, torpedo and bombs, or developed as military code encryption
machines during World War II. IBM
punched cards tabulated the ebb and flow of inmates through Nazi concentration
camps.
Weather forecasting became an art during the First World War and a
craft during the Second, when secret firefights raged around remote, ice-floe
weather stations. Nowadays, weather
modification has become a weapon of war, without our knowing much about it—at
least until it has blown us away or shattered the ground beneath our feet. http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=38963
Some of the first television cameras were targeting devices in the
nosecone of Nazi anti-ship missiles.
Another one was installed in an American robot bomber packed with
explosives, which blew up prematurely and killed its test pilot, the eldest
brother of the Kennedy clan. One of the
first television programs broadcast into outer space was of Hitler’s opening
speech during the Nuremberg Olympics.
We can’t take that back.
WeaponWorld’s first greeting to the Universe – engraved on a gold
record platter and sent out beyond Pluto on a Voyager spacecraft – was read by
Kurt Waldheim. Despite a Nazi résumé
everyone managed to gloss, he was elected Secretary General of the United
Nations. We might as well have
broadcast: “Brethren of the Universe, this way to the showers!” as did the
Nazis, to coax select prey off their train and into a gas chamber.
Virtual reality, robotics and cybernetics have been first and
foremost weapons applications. That
murderous video game you are playing in your handset? It was first developed to simplify the task
of info-saturated helicopter and tank crews, combat commanders and military pilots.
Ultra-complex computer encryption codes risk being broken daily;
but we have yet to decipher 3,500 samples of pre-Vedic inscriptions dug up from
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa; 800 texts dug up from Meroe, an African Republic
whose people elected their own kings and thus conquered Pharaonic Egypt; Cretan
scriptures known for decades; and thousands of inscriptions from the Etruscan
kingdom that civilized the first Romans.
We are quite clever with weapons and fools almost everywhere else.
Nicholas Appert developed large-scale food canning circa
1810. He managed to win a military prize
by feeding Napoleonic sailors aboard ship, long before Pasteur figured out how
to sterilize glass beakers with heat and vacuum. He put vegetables (paste?) in champagne bottles
bathed in boiling water; (he probably learned the trick from a genius
grandmother). Afterwards, some canny
Englishmen bought his patent and used tin cans.
This, according to James Burke in his book Circles, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 2000, p. 40-41. I
highly recommend his books and videos, since they deal with the history of
Learning in general.
Our high-tech, over-processed, irradiated and freeze-dried foods
serve the same purpose. ‘Modern’ food
processing provides gigatons of food of indifferent quality and extended shelf
life, yet with minimal labor inputs.
This is just the specification for warfare—though probably the worst
fare for our poisoned guts.
The latest industrial food craze involves irradiating
over-processed foods. The radioactive
treatment of food permits total indifference as to its quality. After all, irradiated rat shit is sterile and
therefore yummy once properly disguised with flavor additives.
More recently (in 2006) plans have been made to infuse food with
bacteria said to be “detrimental to other bacteria.” Would this new infection not affect the
natural bacterial colonies in our digestive system? There are more bacteria in the human body
than human cells.
Then we ask ourselves why colon cancer is an epidemic killer and why
three fourths of the American population complains of chronic digestive
disorder (again, with no acknowledgement from
the medical elite, but plenty of advertising for palliatives). Cures don’t sell more drugs.
Not to mention the genetic insertion of natural pesticides into
food crops. I can’t eat cheap tomatoes
any longer – no pizza, no spaghetti, no lasagna (my favorite!), no nothing with
tomatoes or tomato sauce – they make me sick, except maybe for expensive
‘organic’ ones. My wife has the same
problem with onions, the poor dear.
If insects won’t eat these foods or die when they do so, what are
we doing buying them up and slurping them down?
What alien boogeyman is foisting that on us? Canned rat shit? Insects eat rat shit!
It is amazing to watch my voracious cat turn its nose away from
the cheap meat leftovers on my plate.
His sense of smell must tell him something about its nutritional value
that I really don’t want to find out.
Its marinade in chlorine bleach, no doubt? Kentucky-fried Colonel’s secret
ingredient. Disgusting!
The agrochemical industry is a peacetime subsidy program for the
titanic explosives and chemical weapons industries required for warfare. There is an amazing correlation between
weapon production and peace consumption.
Artificial fertilizers correspond to military explosives; pesticides,
herbicides, bleach and synthetic dyes equal war gases; automobile and fossil
fuel industries are required for motorized armies.
Modern weapon technology may have introduced Mach 5 and faster
fighter jets (and sung its praises); but it still takes me forty minutes to
commute 5.3 miles from home to work every day: peace technology at the speed of
cow.
Whatever your opinion in the matter, you own a private vehicle for
one principal reason. Your Army must
issue you one, which you (or some other weapon technician) must be able to
drive and maintain. Your Army will need
them to carry you, your buddies (or your children and their buddies) and
weapons across the modern battlefield.
You couldn’t wait for a bus or a tram on a battlefield. Nor could you wander around as light infantry
for very long and expect to survive. Nor
could your government subsidize just busses and trams and their drivers and
fixers alone—unless everyone inhabited PeaceWorld, and battlefields were
nightmares of a long-forgotten past.
Of course, public transport is better, cheaper, safer, less toxic,
more reliable and profitable—what else have I missed? The relative merits of public versus private
transport are irrelevant to military logic.
Public transport is inconvenient because it is inadequately
funded; it is funded inadequately so that it can remain inconvenient and thus
persuade everyone to buy a car. Cars are
no more convenient; they are technological monstrosities of a kind idolized by
weapon technology. Adequate public
transport does not exist yet, thanks to deliberate underfunding that has gone
on for generations. Plus the thousands
of hours of pro-car advertising that we submit to, compared to which even Nazi
propaganda would have seemed even-handed.
When substitute technologies do emerge, they will make automobiles
look like the industrial murderers and environmental wreckers they actually
are. No one in the future will believe
we favored such mechanical monstrosities.
Celluloid was the first plastic produced in quantity; its primary
spin-offs were gun cotton and dynamite.
In some of the first studies in the field of biochemistry, Professor
Neuberg of Berlin got yeast to ferment glycerin from sugar. His ‘cultured’ nitroglycerin sustained the
German war effort during the Great Paroxysm; this despite a tight Allied naval
embargo against German imports of fats and oils normally used to make such
explosives.
The Jewish chemist, Chaim Weizmann, extracted the Balfour
Declaration from very reluctant British officials. It upheld the Jewish reoccupation of Israel,
even though the Brits at the time would much rather have left Palestine in the
hands of its Muslim majority. Weizmann,
later on the first president of Israel, achieved this triumph by isolating a
bacterium that could convert carbohydrates into acetone the British needed to plasticize
their unlimited share of high explosive cordite during World War I—much the way
a fairy tale wizard might have achieved it. During the Greater Paroxysm, an
equivalent discovery of synthetic fuel prolonged the Nazi agony—like a potent
curse in a Teutonic legend.
Or check out the life of Fritz Haber, Nobel Peace Prize winner in
1919. A renounced Jew (so as to fit
better into the bigoted German upper class), he invented ammonium fertilizer
before World War I, war gasses during the war, and an insecticide that was
turned afterwards into Ziklon B, a genocide gas. The merciless irony of his life, which led to
the suicide of his beloved wife, would have been impossible on PeaceWorld.
The first chemical companies arose to manufacture corned black
powder, much more potent than the Chinese variety invented almost a thousand
years prior.
Alfred Nobel’s dynamite-financed Peace Prize was awarded to
Realpolitik mass murderers, and no one so much as blinked. The great DuPont chemical corporation –
“Better Living through Chemistry”… or, as my Dad put it, (New Jersey resident
as a child and passionate forester, later), “Better Living through Bad Smells”
– sought its original contracts in the provision of gunpowder and
dynamite.
Joseph Pulitzer founded his Pulitzer Prize, supposedly to reward
outstanding journalism. His yellow
journalism framed the innocent Spanish Government when the American battleship
Maine blew up spontaneously in Havana harbor.
Thus did he manage to embroil America in the Spanish-American war—to the
great profit of his rich friends and the infinite regret of “mothers who lost
their son(s) in battle.”
No one-word name for them exists, even though there have always
been so many of them, God knows. I
suppose we just don’t wish to talk about them.
Did you know that Mother’s Day used to be International Mother’s Peace
Day, before the greeting card people took it over? Thank Hallmark Corporation, that Republican
cash cow. Sentimentality enslaved to
weapons mentality. Typical human
tragedy.
By the way, the Spanish American War and its geopolitical fallout
stifled American Progressives during the 1890’s. It ensured another century of weapon-based,
corporate-ruled Americanism. I’ll bet
that most of my American readers believe that Americanism and reflexive
militarism are contradictory. Think again.
In The Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore asks
why world-class economists consign ecological damage, labor abuse and resource
depletion to wastebaskets of ‘externality’ that they may proceed to
ignore. We might also ask why
homelessness, criminality, substandard education and child abuse/neglect are
ignored as cost factors. They, too, are
reliable indicators of peace incompetence and weapons mastery.
I would rather call economists econologicians, and their
‘science’ econologic. They scrimp
on their logic by dismissing as externalities critical factors like
sustainability. How convenient for them
and their paymasters!
Mr. Gore would never admit that econologic, like all current
science, justifies and rationalizes weapon technology. That is its primary goal, if unstated. No need to figure out why National Capitalism
– the ultimate evolution of weapons econologic – makes such destructive
choices. Its reasoning is obvious.
“It was the gradual creation of an effective bureaucracy which brought an end to all this filth and disease, and the public servants did so against the desires of the mass of the middle and upper classes. The free market opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it. The civilized opposed it. Most of the educated opposed it. That was why it took a century to finish what could have been done in ten years. Put in contemporary terms, the market economy angrily and persistently opposed clean public water, sanitation, garbage collection and improved public health because they appeared to be unprofitable enterprises which, in addition, put limits on the individual’s freedoms. These are simple historic truths which have been forgotten today, thus permitting the fashionable belief that even public water services should be privatized in order that they might benefit from the free-market system.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 239.
Do you have a favorite progressive project? House a few of the homeless, maybe, or feed a
few of the poor in your hometown or state?
Make this or that corporation ‘nicer,’ or one of its subsidiaries? Cultivate a few more trees here, more family
farms there? Educate your kids and their
friends a little better? Reduce
corruption by a few pennies per year in this market or that country? Render your people a little less vulnerable
to racial or ethnic or religious violence and its economic repercussions?
Forget it! Reductionist and
atomistic peace projects will never resist the Gibraltar inertia of weapon
mentality, which applies holistic and inclusive principles to its own
objectives. Well-meaning meliorists
(people who try to fix one little thing bit by bit) shouldn’t expect their
isolated fixes to succeed until we’ve turned this other thing around,
first. Only thereafter will those fixes
succeed, and then beyond their wildest dreams.
People are for the most part ritualistic creatures. Everything important they do and think about
and feel is regulated by the drumbeat of ritual dance and the droning of ritual
worship dictated by the ritualistic repetition of culture myths.
We could try to improve things, one by one and little by little, sickened
by the culture of war and its mythology—we would certainly fail. We must turn the whole world’s ritual dances
and mythmaking into those of peace; at which point we may succeed so fully that
it will seem like a miracle.
Once everyone agrees that our social evils spring from the same
source, Learners may reverse this toxic outflow by rational reinvestment. Once peace becomes our first priority, many
social improvements that we’ve fought for and failed at so bitterly, will click
into place spontaneously and flourish as if they had been on autopilot all
along. Our descendants will nurture
peace as steadily as we grind out weapon technology. They will wonder what all the fuss was
about.
We are the designated pathfinders, by default. Are you ready? You must be, since you’ve persevered thus far
in your hard read of Learners. Tell your friends about this work and read
on. That is good.
“Judge not, that ye not be judged.”
Matthew 7-1.
“Sacred writings
“At the center of all the world’s main religions lies a body
of sacred writing, revered by believers.
Scrupulous attention is paid to identifying or preserving the linguistic
features of the original texts. Often,
the texts are accompanied by a long tradition of commentary, which may itself
take on special religious significance.
“Buddhism The
Pali Canon, based on oral tradition, containing the teaching of the
Buddha. Pali became the canonical
language for Buddhists from many countries, but comparable texts came to exist
in other languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, as the religion evolved.
“Christianity The
Bible, consisting of the 39 books of the Old Testament, written in Hebrew, and
the 27 books of the New Testament, written in Greek. Several other writings, known collectively as
the Apocrypha, and preserved only in Greek, have controversial status. A Latin translation of the Bible, known as
the Vulgate, is prominent in the Roman Catholic tradition.
[Author’s note: by St. Jerome and adopted by the Council of
Trent (Trento) during the 16th century.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition accepts the first seven councils and
thus, along with the Catholic tradition, rejects other Churches from
communion. The oldest established
Christian churches include the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian and Armenian. The Church of Alexandria, Egypt, was founded
by St. Mark in 43 CE, one of the earliest denominations in continuous
existence. In 451, the Council of
Chalcedon established that Christ had separate natures, divine and human. These churches rejected Christ’s separate
nature and declared that His nature was one; by doing so, they formed the
Oriental Orthodox Church, which rejected the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) as
leader of the Church. This split
occurred during the suppression of iconoclasm in Constantinople, which began
with the canon of the Synod of Elvira (c. 305), the first to forbid images in
church. See iconography, iconoclasm,
idolatry—a work in progress, perhaps.
There have been many more Christian heresies, annihilated since; also,
the surviving Protestant offshoots: Calvinism, Methodism, Lutheranism, etc.;
and the Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints].
“Hinduism The Vedas, a
wide range of texts written in Sanskrit and preserved largely through a meticulous
oral tradition, which takes particular care over accuracy of pronunciation.
[Should be included, here, the Jain heresy that attempted to
synthesize Hinduism with Buddhism; and the Sikh: Hinduism, Christianity and
Islam.]
“Islam The
Qur’an, or Koran [Qran], which Muslims believe was dictated to the Prophet
Mohammed by Allah, through the angel Jibreel (Gabriel) beginning in the month
Ramadan. The whole revelation took place
during a period of over twenty years. It
is written in classical Arabic, in a style which is considered miraculous,
beyond ability to imitate. The
memorization of the text in childhood acts simultaneously as an introduction to
literacy.
[Author’s note: The succession of leaders of the Umma: the
faithful of Islam and submitted to Allah, is disputed between Shia and Sunni
elites. Mohammed
did not address this topic, period.
Just as the Jew’s sacred text described a succession of
prophets, judges and kings to rule Israel in descending order of legitimacy
(ending with Solomon and his acquisitive son, Rehoboam),
Mohammed declared that he was the last prophet God would give to humanity, of a
line of twenty-six or seven beginning with Adam. http://www.muziqpakistan.com/board/index.php?showtopic=27411. It is up to us more and more corrupt judges,
kings and mere warlords to succeed him as best we can.
The Sunnis believe that the Caliphs of Islam: Abu Bakr,
‘Umar, ‘Uthman ibn-Affan, and Mu’awiyah, were legitimate. The Shia believe that Imams were
meant to rule—the closest male relatives of Mohammed: Ali, his son-in-law, and
Ali’s sons, Hassan and Hussein, plus eight more assassinated in succession by
the Caliphs. Some Caliphs were also
assassinated, but less often.
According to the Shia, or ‘twelvers,’ the twelfth Imam,
Mohammed, will emerge to rule Islam. “He
is the Hidden One, the Awaited One, whose emergence as Mahdi will herald the
end of time,” per Karl E. Meyer’s fascinating little book, The Dust of Empire:
The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland, Public Affairs, The century Foundation,
New York, 2003, p. 56.
[Author’s note: I should include a list of World Saviors to
come, promised by every religion – either lots of them or only the One
described just as well by every religion – but not now.
Any further subdivision of the Umma into separate schools or
disciplines would be sterile from an Occidental point of view, since their
monolithic adherence to Shari’a (the law of God as exposed in the Q’ran and its
direct, hadith commentaries) is virtually unanimous. There have been several attempts to impose a
logical analysis or mystical interpretation on Shari’a, especially by Sufi
mystics, more or less successfully. If
this topic interests you, I direct you to Albert Hourani’s A History of
the Arab Peoples, (Warner Books edition, Hachette Book Group USA, New York, 1991),
whose delicate objectivity and brute scholarship reflect a long line of Muslim
historians beginning with the incomparable Ibn Khaldun, whose brilliant Muqadimma any historian
– Muslim or other – would be flattered to be compared to.
We should include the Bahai
heresy, here: an attempt to synthesize and commingle the three faiths of the
Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam – rejected by all three.] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy
“Judaism The Bible
in Hebrew or the Old Testament, especially as found in its first five books,
traditionally said to have been written by Moses. Later varieties in Hebrew, and some in
Aramaic, form the language of the large collection of oral and written
commentaries on the Bible, known as the Talmud.
“[Mass] Literacy is often introduced into a community by the
spread of a religion. As a result, the distribution
of writing systems in the world today reflects the distribution of world
religions far more clearly than it does the distribution of language
families.” David Crystal, Editor, Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Second Edition, Press Syndicate of the University of
Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 388.
Organized religions demonstrate the weapon/peace antinomy quite clearly. Each preacher, priest, rabbi, mullah, imam, ulam, monk, etc., exposes to our observation the practical outcome of his or her belief. Every religious hierarchy shelters a few peace mentors: the early originators like Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed; and their lovers, today’s marginalized mystics. It also shelters many weapon mentors: secondary organizers like Paul, Augustine and the Caliphs; and their lovers among today’s religious bureaucrats.
Regardless of their religious creed, peace mentors hope that fearless love, truth and peace will triumph in time, under a watchful, loving God. They feel deep sympathy for other principled advocates of these hopes. This, regardless of ideological and theological dispute.
Weapon mentors use religion (and other cultural memes) to set themselves apart. They fight – often to the death of innocents entrusted to their care – even though they and their declared enemies may share the same creed and symbols. They reject the common bonds of Learning, which rejection fosters the conflict they crave.
Actual political systems and ideologies are byproducts of blind human faith: the bastardized offspring of our weapon religions. They illustrate quite aptly the weapon/peace antinomy. Merely substitute the old religious verbiage with more recent ideological jargon and observe similar contradictions unfold, as familiar weapon and peace mentors break up like oil and water. Note how the weapon/peace antinomy remains carefully unexamined and therefore intact.
For weapon technicians like us, religion is a group obligation rooted in social obedience. It is ceremonial, objective, conformist, reductive, repeatable, stolid, recognizable and rational. Madness is loathsome to it. Orthodox religions follow well-worn scripts easily memorized and analyzed. They strive to overwrite the collective superconscience by imposing their own myths and prejudices upon it.
Only dead prophets may taste of sacred wonder; the rest of us must be satisfied with mandatory religious formations. The more complete our submission to this pointless nonsense, the better the outcome for traditional religions.
Weapon managers rip off the most captivating and rich religious symbols they can find—before which everyone must kowtow. Religious hierarchs reject the sacred, in and of itself. Any real-world manifestation of it is dreadful to them, since it evades their control and exposes them as inadequate clowns in fancy dress. Ceremonial religionists tend to be compulsive, censorious, time-bound, historical, archival, absolutist, simplistic, formulaic, linear, rigid, grim, bitter and humorless. They emphasize form, structure and mode of transmission. “Our medium is the message.”
To the primal consciousness, everything is sacred. Rituals and ceremonies merely enhance the sacred wonder that a clear-sighted witness may glimpse during the day or dreams at night. Sacred worship is rooted in self-awareness; it is an individual gift: subjective, irreproducible, passionate, intimate, dramatic, chaotic, adaptive, situational, transcendent, dream-driven and drug accelerated. This form of worship borders on insanity: a narrow birth passage into the sacred, reserved for a select, tormented few (shamans). It is often conveyed wordlessly, through music, dance (as practiced by Sufi, American Indians and some Africans), sensory and extrasensory clues. In general, sacred religions are obsessive, creative, naturalistic, timeless, cumulative, magical, pragmatic, anecdotal, spontaneous, holistic and playful—sometimes hurtfully. If possible, they strive to tap into the collective superconscience but not over-write it.
As far as they are concerned, who would dare impose such constraints on the limitless Sacred—except lifelong regimented religionists? Unlike them, primal seekers emphasize content, meaning and outcomes. “The Message is.”
Human faith has endured crushing entropy at the hands of faithless sociopaths. It has degenerated from a state of reverence and awe shared by everyone, into a traffic jam of elaborate fabrications: each one conflicting, exclusive and mandatory—interchangeably ridiculous. The only justifications that remain for current religions are the weapon technologies they have spawned to safeguard their vacuity.
Their practitioners’ habits of anti-thought, gross simplification and rote repetition may be passively neutral or actively vicious, depending on the level of ignorance and misery that prevails under their influence. Each new weapon dogma becomes something more cruel, arbitrary and prejudicial than that of its competitors. It becomes deaf to its own hypocrisy and immune to improvement. Its zealots merit contempt, disbelief, ridicule and pity in proportion to their fervor, numbers, political clout and firepower. Any religion that condones mass violence, automatically invalidates itself and its gullible adherents.
In truth, mass religions numb our awareness of the sacred. They can stifle sacred wonder and turn a majority away from God, but never replace them. It is no wonder that so many people believe in nothing, any longer, at least until total misery and death draw nigh! Current religions operate on the assumption that they can only flourish in the misery they foster among their believers, and could never do so amidst universal peace and abundance, which they reject.
The best religious rituals and formulae would amplify our unique perception of sacred wonder without harming it. What we truly seek is a search for times past, a remembrance of sacred wonders from which we have disinherited our souls. What we really crave is an olden awareness more profound than younger, more ceremonial dogma. We require its complement, its fructifier and validator: an ancient, more profound awareness.
In the meantime, everyone should be free to witness to God or not, wear and display religious symbols or reject them, neither be forbidden nor required to do so, as long as it is done with reverence in private, respect for the beliefs of others in public settings, and quietly, without menace. This could only happen without resentment on PeaceWorld, where every peace religion would be equally responsive to the sacred, and where worldly ones no longer existed.
Author's Note: The word 'Rapture' cannot be found in the Bible. A few biblical allusions reflect something like it—but not enough for praiseworthy prophecy. This is not serious biblical scholarship, but is abused as fantasy fiction and vicious wish fulfillment.
Jesus said the hour of His Return was unknown by Him and known only by His Father. He warned us of false prophets who would dare proclaim it (Mark 13).
Stage a train wreck and call it Good News; stuff as many innocents aboard as you can, to their doom. Whether you choose to play this dirty trick or not, you shifty fundamentalists, I choose this other.
“For that
matter, life in Paris had picked up since Hugh Capet, who’d lived there while a
mere Count, made it his household seat [after being crowned King]; its reigning
hustle-bustle made a stay there much sought-after. All the same, toward
the end of the 10th century, a mourning veil seems to have covered
the city, and great religious fervor arose, since a prevalent popular belief
pegged the year 1,000 as the end of the world.
“Historians of
olden times affirm that, far from resisting this error, priests endorsed it
with all their might. It was said in church
councils: ‘It nears, the Advent of
God in all His terrible majesty, the Eternal
Shepherd before Whom every pastor and his flock will be summoned.’ Chroniclers reported that sermons in
Paris churches proclaimed the advent of that terrible day, which notion induced
grim visions in the mind’s eye of the gullible and the fervent. Likewise,
so as not to be found unfit for mercy, the weak of spirit, cowards and those
without a clear conscience, scurried off to seek divine indulgence by bringing
all kinds of gifts to the Church, never asking what priests could do with such
riches, once the year 1,000 had chimed in the last hour on Earth.
“Rich and poor,
the great and the humble came running to give, ever fearful of appearing too
stingy before The Eternal, and came back with more offerings fit for the
Sovereign Judge’s favor. And not only did they give, but they prayed all
over the place, tallying the remaining days they could hope of live. An
unspeakable trance paralyzed everyone on Earth; fear was everywhere; the
contracts of the day bore a funereal headline in Latin, ‘The end-day
draws nigh!’
“Priests who got
ahold of gold, abbots and bishops whose holdings
swelled with rich domains, exhorted the great sinners trying to expiate their
sins and no longer troubled by worries of the future, to let go of worldly
things and often ill-got riches they did not need in order to die. ‘And monks hung on for that fatal moment, in
cloistered abstinence, in solitary grapples of the heart, amidst temptations,
falls, remorse and strange
visions’; because they, too, believed in the end of the world. And one might have thought that they hoped to
defuse celestial anger by means of prayer and acts of kindness. And if
some were rash enough to target the gullible public with odious scams, many
more must have shared the common viewpoint.
“Otherwise, one
might have thought that nature herself were preparing for a great
cataclysm. The three or four years prior
to the year 1,000 were rife with evils of all kinds: floods, famine and
pestilence, everything seemed to bring together a series of disasters with the
intention of ruining mankind. Anyhow, the millennium arrived and the
world was still there. Once that fateful day had passed without
fulfilling its grim promise, humanity seemed aroused and reborn. And one
might have concluded that the clergy’s real power began from that date on, since
it wound up holding substantial wealth, a great aid in securing its dominion
over the world. Superstition reigned as mistress supreme over every
awareness.”
<http://www.paris-pittoresque.com/histoire/16b.htm>
Most of the Rapture lasted about two weeks. Then it purred along as people Disappeared by ones and twos … here and there, now and then.
At first, it was only earsplitting preachers, televised evangelists and radio sermonizers who Disappeared. The New Year began on a Sunday. Most of the airwaves thudded into dead air time, as radio sermons and media preachers shut their traps mid-pomposity. TV test patterns quietly replaced nonstop pleas for more cash, bigotry and exclusion in the holy name of Jesus Christ.
Pulpits emptied in front of congregations who fled panic-stricken when their preachers Disappeared. Only later did they realize what they had fled from. Then they came back and prayed that much more fervently, despite their dwindling numbers. Many stayed and stayed, and prayed and prayed. That was worthless. Only a few were Chosen.
You see, you had to have special talents to be Chosen. First, you had to crow and preen your own salvation. Second, you had to dream of casting the rest of humanity into the deepest, darkest pit of Perdition without a second's hesitation or remorse. Thirdly, you had to foretell Christ’s nearing Return, which prophesy Christ said was impossible even for Him, much less for some wolf in sheep’s clothing, some mortal blasphemer brandishing a Bible.
Only God knows the time of His Son’s Return and only God can pronounce it. Christ spoke this truth categorically—no mere man may deny Him.
Jesus said that God will forgive every sin except blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter He left us pending His Return. What do you think that could be, but this denial? Only sociopaths (the sick of society, in Greek) could perform it. Fear and shun them.
As for the Exile of the Jews and their restoration to the Promised Land: that had already taken place twice in history and could repeat itself another dozen times in the thousands of years to come, should God will it; or else never again. In any case, not a dependable Sign of His Return.
False prophets! Go to your knees before your congregants and beg them forgiveness for your evident lie, carefully forbidden in the Bible! The rest of you, the lambs of God, take no heed to their blasphemy! Be at all times prepared for His Return (like a thief in the night), but never again deceived by the empty clamor of His imminence.
It was difficult for most people to reconcile Jesus' commands to love our enemy, our neighbors as ourselves and to die for our friends, with the idea that most eternal souls were expendable refuse. That kind of discrimination took grandiose vision, fanatical leadership skills, immense heartlessness and a giant ego: special talents only a few possessed.
At first, churches were packed standing-room-only; long lines snaked around the corner. Eventually, they went vacant. The rest gave up and took their families home, as mournful as kids skipped over during a pickup ball game.
People just Disappeared. One moment, they’d be there, spouting vicious nonsense; then the next, they’d be Gone. They would grimace as if suffering from a heart attack; some would gasp as if to scream… then they’d be Gone. Witnesses reported hearing a vague popping noise as atmospheric pressure refilled the void left by those Swept Away. Then they sniffed something like a cap gun going off, vaguely sulfuric …
They reported that when the Chosen disappeared at high altitude, they seemed to be more at ease. People caught up in aircraft smiled and Disappeared―or so surviving passengers reported. Some planes crashed when everyone aboard was Swept Away. Runaway Lear Jets became commonplace. Most civilian flights landed safely, flown in by shaken copilots and emergency volunteers.
People in tall buildings Disappeared more easily, so did mountaineers―or so it was reported. Denver, Lima, Grenoble, and Quito became favored Departure spots. By now, fervent evangelicals were gathering up a few belongings and heading for the hills. Many never returned. All the best ones returned, crestfallen at having been Left Behind.
Some people who had climbed ladders down from a rooftop, left a foot, an ankle and half a shin bone and fibula behind, neatly severed, along with the corresponding shoe, sock and pant leg. Evangelicals got wise and started camping out on rooftops. No one could get them down and few tried. Eventually, some were Gone. The rest, the best, remained.
Within the next few days, the Right Wing was amputated from Congress and from every State Legislature. The Republican Party was reduced to a shambles; the Democratic, not much better. Forty-five remaining Congresspeople met in emergency session to appoint temporary replacements. Half the Supreme Court was Gone, as were most Federal Judges: the most dependable reactionaries. The Oval Office went vacant and so did the offices of most political appointees.
Under emergency rules, an Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services took over the Presidency, pending crash elections. That doctor was an outspoken agnostic by the name of Dean, about to be fired by the Administration. She had made too many waves about family planning, universal healthcare and corporate-sponsored malnutrition and pollution. Nobody remained, senior to her. No-one complained and she was elected President shortly thereafter. She turned out to be quite good at her new job, much better than the last dozen or so.
The military snapped to DefCon 1, but found no one to nuke. Many missile command bunkers and Pentagon offices were empty. A few cadets rattled around the military academies; the Coast Guard, NOAA and Merchant Marine ones were only slightly more crowded. Most private military schools became ghost towns; those few cadets Left Behind weren't comfortable there in any case, and went home. Warships sailed home with skeleton crews, and fighter-bombers fell from the sky, like sparrows off an active volcano. The American military, what was left of it, was recalled from overseas. That operation took two months and concluded without a single combat casualty. Trigger-happy thugs were Gone from both sides.
Fox News abandoned the airwaves, as did other news affiliates. AM radio commentary was Gone. Media executives and talk show hosts Disappeared (guess which ones). The main newspapers went temporarily out of print; they had to find new editors and sponsors. No one was left to invoke “journalistic balance and objectivity” and thus pay due reverence to evil.
Basically, if you had spouted lies and ranted loud enough in favor of hate crimes and greed, you were Gone. If you had been terrified enough by the others to advocate their murder, you were Gone. If you had killed, starved and tormented people other than by accident, you were Gone. Persist in doing so by accident … you get my point.
In their fantasy world, many of those Swept Away had already sacrificed everyone to Armageddon on Earth, and then to eternal damnation from Heaven. Quality mass education? Ecological sanity? Peace and justice for helpless foreigners? Why bother! Wasn’t this planet God's ashtray? Couldn’t He purify, in His own good time, all the filth and horror Christianity might consider necessary to hasten His Return? As far as they were concerned, those excluded from the Rapture were no more worthwhile than rotting garbage.
While they were absolutely right about being Swept Away, it turned out that the Earth and everyone Left Behind gained tremendously from their Departure.
What became of those Caught Up in the Rapture? Who cares? Good riddance!
Sure, there would be disasters, potent signs in the heavens, and wars and rumors of wars―just as there had been for thousands of years; nothing prophetic in any of that. But with surprising ease, the local situation got a lot better for humanity.
What was most funny? It wasn’t just fanatical Christians who Disappeared; Muslims did, too. Those who Disappeared had complained, quite loudly, that there wasn’t any real Islam anymore, that they were the last True Believers in Allah. All their neighbors were just filth-loving, pro-Western heretics fit for nothing more than execution by jihad. Those who Disappeared tended to cling to Wahhab, Salafi and other brain-fried fanaticisms that preached mass murder for the greater glory of Islam.
Whether Texan or Saudi, all those big talkers and all their big talk Went Away. Papers drifted untended across empty Taliban madrassas and fundamentalist Christian campuses whose students wandered home when their Bigotry 101 coaches Disappeared.
The same thing happened to Hindus. Rabid nationalists, mosque wreckers, library torchers, lynch mob leaders, all Disappeared. No one was left to blame Indian Muslims and Untouchables for every social problem. No one was left, in all of India and Pakistan, who cared passionately whether Kashmir became independent.
On a gorgeous afternoon typical of their beautiful country, the Kashmiris raised their new state flag in front of the government complex in Srinagar. No-one fired a shot, not even in celebration. The same thing happened in Sri Lanka. All the pistol-wavers Disappeared and peace broke out in their absence. From one end of the Indian sub-continent to the other, there was peace. People agreed to disagree; they even agreed to agree with one another, every once in a while.
New Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in Jerusalem became ghost towns. Palestinian bomb factories, video production facilities and infiltration classrooms emptied. Empty attack helicopters crashed before they could launch Hellfire missiles into civilian crowds. Armored bulldozers stalled, no driver left in their bulletproof cabins. On Friday evenings, few worshippers returned from the Wailing Wall or the Temple Mosque. Busses made their quiet rounds, and street life resumed its normal Israeli whirl of cooler, festive evenings. The Great Wall was quietly reduced to highway paving mix and all the checkpoints were torn down. The Palestinian State became a sovereign reality. Everyone went home and learned to forgive past wrongs. Life went on, regardless.
Besides, no one was left to fantasize about turning Jerusalem, Beirut, Alexandria, Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and other cradles of human civilization into boiling cauldrons of radioactive glass. No more right-wing Jews, Christians and Muslims praying that nuclear hell would crash down on everyone. No more paranoid-schizoid, Book of Revelation fanatics. No more U.S. Administration crazed enough to twist those hate-filled nightmares into reality.
A few Orthodox and Conservative Rabbis Went Away, as did most of the neo-Zionists. Many remaining Jews had to settle for Reformed Rabbis, so few of the others remained. Fattah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad? Ancient Palestinian history. The Vatican residency emptied, so did most of the College of Bishops. The Catholic priesthood was Cut in half, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Conference Vanished, and rural evangelical churches were things of the past. Christian Orthodox hierarchies? Buddhist ones? Protestants? None was spared.
Atheists did not get off any more lightly. The Chinese Central Committee became the Chinese Central Nothing. Peking and other Chinese cities were Swept clean of political police and paid informants. Tiananmen Square became a political forum where any passer-by could speak long, loud and clear, standing tall on a soapbox, just like in London’s Piccadilly Square. It turned out the Chinese were superb democrats once left to their own devices; it turned out every human being was hard-wired for Democracy, once the thugs were Pulled from their backs.
The entire political apparatus of North Korea Disappeared. Its people finally got real food shipped in as fast as cargo ships could unload. They blew up munitions, wrecked weapons and nukes and filled in fortifications, smiling all the while. South Korea disarmed in the time it took to destroy every landmine along the border and build superhighways and rail lines across it. The border was guarded by determined grandmothers who shamed soldiers on both sides into going home. That job wasn’t hard.
Every Khmer Rouge Disappeared, without exception. Vietnam liberated itself from its liberators. Colombia discovered how nice peace was for a change. Africans and South and Central Americans let out deep sighs of relief and got to work rebuilding. Gunfire was no longer heard in Congo jungles or around the Great Lakes. Government buildings emptied in Khartoum, and international petroleum-fascist financiers disappeared. A Sudanese woman could come home in perfect safety after having collected water and fuel for her fire. There wasn’t a “technician” left in Mogadishu and far fewer firefights there or anywhere else.
The same thing happened all over the ex-communist world, everywhere thuggish tyrants had thrived like maggots. Violent fanatics, drug lords and kleptocrats Disappeared from Party headquarters, torture chambers and prison blocks. They Vanished, regardless of stripe and creed, whether they were political insiders, mafia muscle, police on the take, snarling Nazi skinheads or guerilla hooligans. To be of Nazi confession was to be Gone.
Within a few months, the Earth became a Very Different Place.
In the United States, gay marriage, abortion on demand and robust equal opportunity initiatives were quietly legislated and then forgotten. No one argued against them. You could burn the flag or fly it proudly; nobody cared enough to violate your civil rights. Campaign finance reform was swift and draconic; it passed both Houses of Congress without debate. Family planning was subsidized across the planet. Military subsidies were slashed by 99%, as were its industrial expenditures. Somehow, we were more secure than ever before.
Praying in school was something one did quietly in one's own skull, in a civilized way. Jesus had explicitly forbidden us to pray in public and in church. His words from Matthew 6 were fully obeyed, now that disobedient theocrats had Left, who’d given Christ a bad name and turned almost everyone away from His Way, the Only Way now obvious to everyone.
America rebuilt itself into a 21st century powerhouse: an environmental, educational and infrastructure showplace, after generations of inexcusable neglect.
We are in the 21st century – Am I not mistaken? – and not stuck in the Middle Ages, ruled by ignorant barbarians?
Not surprisingly, the same thing happened everywhere else. The poorest regions on Earth boasted higher standards of living than the richest ones had before the Rapture. A Golden Age of Learning… Public schools welcomed everyone, everyone, and got more than enough funding to fulfill their duty.
People wondered what had been the problem, since its solution was so obvious and simple …
Prisons emptied. Either you had really needed to serve time in one—at which point, you were Gone. Or (the case for many prisoners) you had never needed to, really—at which point, the human monsters who had set you up were Gone and you could go straight home. Most prison communes grew smoking herbs tended by a few remaining petty criminals and the best among their guards.
All those Gathered Up by the Rapture added up to a few million at the most: less than one in a thousand human beings. Normal people with normal strengths and weaknesses and a normal range of sins had nothing to do with it. Only exceptional crackpots got Caught Up. Nonetheless, the world’s population dropped dramatically within the next few decades, by universal consent. Every newborn became rare, precious and welcome—not as commonplace, cheap and neglected as dirt.
Most people turned into Judeo-Buddho-Hindu-Christo-Muslims: a cooperative and eclectic amalgam of each creed's best elements, the obvious path for those who wished to practice religion but hated its organized strife.
After all, God is Allah, is Krishna, is every God and None of Them and Nothing and Everything anybody could ever fantasize—all at the same time, with hands tied behind His/Her/Its/Nothing’s back. God is big, you see; not small and musty and cramped like your typical fundamentalist's mind. Nobody Left Behind could argue with that, and nobody wanted to.
Fundamentalists would have fought to (someone else's) death so that nothing of the sort would ever happen; but they were out of the picture now. No one was left to exploit faith and divert charity for personal profit, preach bodily mutilation for the salvation of souls and thus give religion a bad name.
Atheism became a very difficult belief to get enthused about, since something must have caused the Rapture. Eventually, everyone discovered the love of Jesus Christ—in a manner the fundamentalists could never have foreseen, foretold or shared honestly. (See Matthew 6-5).
Most large corporations folded; their MBAs, CEOs and CFOs Disappeared. People bought only what they needed and sold only what was needed—no more and no less. Most advertising vanished and so did its revenues.
All of a sudden, television became interesting. Imagine that, smart television programming! The planetary IQ virtually doubled overnight. You could turn on the radio and listen to fine music for hours on end or thoughtful dialog―not endless patter about nothing of importance, interrupted by an occasional trash-pop ditty. Even MTV let go its endless succession of commercial babblers and started playing good music again.
Slowly but surely, people began replanting Eden. They discovered you could plant groves of Scotch Pine (Pinus sylvestris) in the bare laetrile soil of strip-mined, tropical ex-rain forests. Those groves would attract birds and animals and their seed-filled dung; then the jungle would grow back spontaneously. Millions of such groves sprang up, brainchildren of the Gaviotas community.
Industrial applications of terra preta replaced chemical fertilizers in agriculture and began restoring the quality of the soil. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm.
Clean, safe Thorium reactors replaced every dirty and dangerous Uranium one.
Across the world, the poor discovered that they could build dependable, cool-in-summer, warm-in-winter, earthquake-resistant housing from sunbaked earth-brick Domes of Rumi, on your own, very cheap. No one had to go homeless, now that all the house wreckers were Gone and Nader Khalili had shown us the right way to do it.
Anywhere on Earth, a weary traveler could knock at any door and expect to receive welcome, a good meal and clean water. Everywhere on Earth, a good farmer could farm his crops with good clear water never tainted by human violence.
What Man never managed to accomplish, God alone made happen. During this ultimate Revolution, the tyrants were Sent Packing, and the meek inherited the Earth―bloodlessly, as promised and right on schedule.
Everyone rejoiced in their newfound grace, prosperity and freedom. No one missed the dearly departed fanatics; except, perhaps, for their mothers and children, those few who remained.
Even now, I fear I do not differ enough from the Chosen to be spared their Fate. I, too, condemn fellow human beings whom I despise and fear. I, too, count on God to grant me salvation while I deny it to them.
Please, most merciful Lord, do not condemn me to spend all eternity with them! That would be true Hell. God's justice must surely…
[Notes found on an abandoned rooftop].
“In the beginning, our Creator gave all the races of mankind the
same songs and the same drums to keep in touch with Him, to keep faith. But people kept forgetting. In the fullness of time, the spiritual
traditions of all the peoples – they are the same – will be united again in a great gathering of their secret leaders,
[my italics], and they will gain power to remake the world.” Mohawk prophesy told by Tom Porter, from The Great American Bathroom Book,
Volume III, (don’t laugh, check them out), Stevens W. Anderson, Ed.,
Compact Classics, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, 1994, p. 439.
It is obvious that our mass religions are morally bankrupt,
despite their best practitioners’ heroic devotion. The evils they forgive themselves, more than
offset their claims of validity.
Even though our spirit-lives require the nourishment of true
religion, we cannot dismiss the organized kind outright – tempting as that
simplification might seem – based on the trivia that it offers us, like
housecats their dead vermin. Without
religion, omnicide crouches in our hearts where real worship belongs.
Freethinking materialists commit the worst atrocities by far. The scope of their evil demands such titanic
virtuosity from them, that they cannot waste time on the ‘trivial loser’
pursuits of spirit.
Those of us more intent on The Good, had
better inspire ourselves with a Good God.
It may be irrelevant whether that God is ‘imaginary’ or eternal from our
stunted point of view. We need a role
model more assertive, heroic and benign than the vicious, envious, error-prone
and man-aping creeps currently on display as God substitutes.
Details of the Cathari religion are complex, diverse and poorly
documented. According to ancient Manichaeism
from which the Cathari faith sprang, an Evil Principle dominates the physical
world and an equal Principle of Good seems to balance it on a non-material
plane. Like oil and water in colloidal
suspension, these principles interlace in cosmic contention. Every newborn child is a frail vessel
animated by a spark of good and cast adrift in a black typhoon of evil. Any material object could be seen as Satan’s
instrument.
The Cathari heresy evolved from the intersection of three historical
phenomena, among others.
The first one dates back nearly two thousand years, from the time
the Prophet Mani was crucified by dominant Zoroastrian clergy in 276 EC. Manichaeism spread from its Persian source
into Central Europe, notably in Bulgaria where it turned into the Bogomil
heresy around 900; until the Christian Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and then the
expanding Turkish Empire (the ultimate military expression of Islam) repressed
it around 1396. As peaceful Manichean
congregations submitted to military conquest and forced conversion by Orthodox
and Muslim fanatics, a handful of its most devout adherents sought refuge in
Italy and Southern France where they converted local Catholics disenchanted by
the gross materialism for which the Catholic clergy had become notorious.
The second phenomena took place prior to the European Crusades
(from 989 to the 1200s). In addition to
its priests’ many personal transgressions, the Catholic Church had just failed
in its two-century quest to initiate the Peace of God and the Truce of God in
Europe. These social movements sought to
forbid combat during the numerous holy days of the Christian calendar; also to
protect peasants, women, children, clergy and their property from combat; and
finally, to institute church arbitration over political rivalries in order to
bring their battles to a halt.
All these efforts failed, and their priestly advocates were
replaced by more profit-minded church leaders.
Militant nobles were permitted their massacres without religious
penalty, in exchange for large sums paid to the Church; just as individual
sinners were allowed to purchase forgiveness for their sins.
Many Christians sought a more honest religion elsewhere,
especially among the incorruptible Cathari.
In essence, the Cathari heresy was one of the first and purest
expressions of Protestantism, exterminated centuries before its ultimate
success (much more worldly and receptive to militarism: see Luther, Calvin, et
al.).
Thirdly, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095, to
retake the Promised Land from the Muslims.
Actually, he was attempting to skim the military banditry that had
poisoned Europe for a millennium, and inject that venom into the heart of the
threatening Islamic empire. He granted
significant benefits to European warriors who swore themselves to that endeavor
(notably the remission of prior sins and debts).
When these warriors gathered from all over Europe in the Langue d’Oc
(at that time, a separate country in Southern France), they booked passage to
the Middle East from there and bought provisions and equipment for their
adventure. When survivors returned from
the Crusades, they landed there and pawned their booty for more portable cash
to take home.
This intensive commerce turned Langue d’Oc towns into the richest
ones in Europe at the time. It was here
that the Troubadour tradition and its lyrical poetry of courtly love and noble
chivalry began to flourish. Religion and
learning thrived, as European, Muslim, Jewish and other multi-lingual Learners
brought rare texts and had them copied and studied.
The Provencal (another name for this region and its language)
nobility was weakened by massive military drafts and casualties during the
Crusades, and by the rise of a prosperous merchant middle class, centuries
before it would reappear in the rest of Europe.
Many remaining nobles (men and women) took up the Cathari religion and became
Perfecti.
The Pope was not very amused when he discovered that most of the
Catholic churches were empty (and therefore not profit centers), in the richest
province in Europe, while the Cathari were venerated everywhere they went. After a few failed attempts at peaceful
debate and reconversion, he cast his poisoned barb of Crusader fury into the
Langue D’Oc: the only time a Crusade was launched against a Catholic territory.
Since he was waging a war against heresy, he needed an
intelligence-gathering agency that would guide the Crusader army, hunt down
heretics, exterminate and replace them.
This handpicked Gestapo would consist of the Franciscan and Dominican
Orders, and their leadership of this Crusade would be the first trial run of
the Inquisition.
Cathari priests were called
Perfecti. There were male and female perfecti, with
separate but equal orders and disciplines: an unimaginable phenomenon at that
time in history. They elected promising
young candidates into their collegium after a rigorous apprenticeship under a
senior sponsor. Those holy partners
wandered the countryside in pairs; they rested at humble hostels deeded to
their fellowship by grateful deathbed bequests.
They needed these houses to secure a room in which to pray alone the
Lord’s Prayer, in obedience to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 6 of the
Bible. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have
needed their own housing; any barn corner, door entrance or trailside would
have sufficed them. These were God’s
tough guys.
Imitating the life Christ prescribed in the Books of Matthew, Luke
and elsewhere in the Bible, they abstained from power, swearing, lies, wealth,
sex and all meat but fish. In perfect
obedience to His words, they never owned at the same time more than two coins,
one cloak and one pair of shoes.
They despised the cross for the naked torture rack it was, helped
the laity with chores and problems, healed and gave counsel when invited to do
so, and relied on the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ exact words for spiritual
sustenance. No dismissal or man-spoken
substitution of His Words was allowed, unlike those our Christian churches
indulge in routinely.
Lay people were called Credentes
(believers). They were free to marry and
tend to their worldly business without interference from the collegium. They received the Consolamentum from Perfecti
on their deathbed and accepted the Endura death fast to seal their conversion into Perfecti: a quicker and less painful
death than most “natural” ones in those days, as well as even crueler ones, for
the most part, that we endure today.
I suspect that the consolamentum included detailed
instruction on how to go straight to Heaven.
Perfecti recited it to deathbed Credentes,
in the same way Buddhist monks recite elements of the Tibetan
Book of the Dead to those in their care who are dying.
I believe that Perfecti
taught that Christ offered Himself as a reincarnation way station and escape
hatch to Heaven. In so doing, He gave us
God’s ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card: the only practical escape from the Wheel of
Desire and Death.
Of course, anyone could graduate to Heaven by becoming fully
Christ-like. Good luck trying that. Could we attempt it through an infinite
series of painful reincarnations? Here
we are: the graduates of a long series of painful reincarnations and two
thousand years of weapon Christianity.
Who dare presume themselves any closer to succeeding at this task?
Christ Himself said we could move mountains if we had but a little
faith. Yet no one, not the Pope, or his
Saints, or any born-again-through-the-mouth Christian – certified by religious
hierarchs just as corrupt as us if not more so – none can shift so much as a
grain of sand in this manner; not me, not you, not anyone besides Christ, in
all the history of Christianity.
Christ said that any man who looks upon a woman commits
adultery. Had he concluded that we were
all in a permanent state of sin?
According to His prescription, nobody on Earth has had any real faith
since He left. No-one is likely to
achieve Heaven in this lifetime, whether on their own or through the mediation
of some self-proclaimed bureaucracy of fellow-sinners. Nor is there any valid verbal or behavioral
contract we can strike with Christ’s so-called earthly representatives in this
lifetime; no matter what hokum these self-proclaimed, self-certified,
self-serving hucksters may dare sell us.
It is obvious they are as hopelessly mired in this hellish world
as we are. How could they be expected to
pull us from this muck? None of them can
quote coherently from His words when they start laying their power trips on
us. They wind up twisting Bible verse
and improvising as they go, since Jesus had nothing to say about their con
games.
I'd rather call today's mass consumption Christians, Paulist-Johnist-Augustins rather than real Christians,
since they pay more heed to the words of mere men than to the word of God
spoken by Jesus. Compared to glorious
Christ – Paul, any preacher or saint you can name, you, me and anyone else – we
are one and the same miserable sinner.
For example, Jesus forbade us to pray in public and in
church. According to Him, we should pray
the Lord's Prayer all alone in a closet (Matthew 6-6). Yet these ministers insist that we must pray
man-made texts with them in crowds filling man-made churches, in order to
‘confirm’ our devotion (as man-interpreted) to Christ.
The text Jesus recommends for prayer is short, simple and
exquisitely sweet; it has nothing to do with current church catechisms and
begging to God in church (for personal gain), no matter how much ‘official
sanction’ surrounds them. Current
Christian doctrine dismisses Christ’s words as irrelevant, and substitutes
needless and perhaps misleading complications.
Two thousand years of murder and sacrilege committed in their name,
confirm their spiritual void.
I’ve asked about that at various “Christian Doctrine” web pages on
the Net. Those webmasters who bothered
to answer me were proud of their dismissal of the words of Jesus, and treated
me as if I were mad (or an imp from Hell) to question them about it. They got all huffy, authoritarian and
dismissive when I dared suggest that their precious doctrine had two-thousand
years of bloody failure to account for, and required repentance,
reinterpretation and radical transformation based on prayer more obedient to
Christ.
Perfect obedience did not seem required of them, nor acceptance
without compromise of His words. They
considered themselves authorized to play word games with the Word of God, based
on two thousand years of defying Jesus’ direct instruction.
Two alternatives remain for true Christians: either Jesus’
teachings are perfect and our interpretation of them is faulty, or current
doctrine is perfect and Jesus’ teachings are faulty. Otherwise, true Christianity would have
become universal on Earth by now. I was
told Jesus’ teachings do not need to become universal. They would rather there were lots of lost
souls, out there, that they could condemn to eternal hellfire. I reject their lies in fancy dress and their
2,000 years of failed doctrine.
Jesus loves everyone; that is His supreme glory. He does not triage acceptable souls; He
leaves that cosmic choice to each soul on its own.
I try to shun that which Jesus forbids, especially when His
instruction is so easy to obey. And I
will never obey mere mortals who preach that I disobey Jesus in order to follow
their version of ‘Christianity.’
Call me a “closet Christian.”
And somebody go fire up the Inquisition, since those pesky Cathari have
come back to life spontaneously!
What’s more, there are no ‘religious’ means to achieve political
justice, notwithstanding Liberation Theology and other feeble attempts by
clerical meliorists to perk up certain peace technologies without confronting
weapon mentality. There has never been,
in written history, a government in a state of religious Grace, a miraculous
religion or an ethically valid permanent institution―no matter how
absolute the self-proclaimed power of any Church: Jewish, Islamic, Protestant,
Catholic or otherwise, before and since.
The more powerful the influence of mass religionists on politics and
government; the more bigoted, ignorant, reactionary and violent their results.
It appears we may serve Mammon or God in this lifetime, but not
both simultaneously.
The Council of Nicaea (Iznik, Turkey) was held in 325 CE. Narrow-minded fundamentalists had recently
‘converted’ from persecuting real Christians with Gestapo-like tactics in the
name of official Paganism. The highest-ranking
among them assembled at Nicaea, rejected reincarnation and expunged all mention
of it from the Bible. Then they started
persecuting real Christians in the name of official Christianity. They have never stopped, since.
“It was only thanks to the contested and late inclusion in
the New Testament of the Book of Revelation that governments and the
administrators of formal religion were able to gain control over Christ’s
language. Rome pushed hard for inclusion. Constantinople and the Church in the east
were strongly opposed. This 4th
Century argument was almost a rehearsal for the subsequent dispute of idolatry,
which began in earnest with Damascus’s (sic) election as Pope in 361 and
dragged on until 841, when the iconoclastic struggle ended with virtual victory
for Rome’s position in favor of idol worship….
…
“Once the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seven Seals and the
whores of Babylon, along with a false and facile division of the world into
good and evil, had been given equal footing in the New Testament with the
Sermon on the Mount, it was hardly surprising that the Christian language had
been undermined to the point where it was a malleable as any old moon
cult. In fact, more malleable. Pagan cults were often difficult for those in
power to deform or manipulate because they combined strict public ritual with a
narrow set of ironclad rules. Paul and
his Epistles are often blamed for Christianity’s strange tangents. But his contributions were merely politics
and policy.
John’s Revelation altered the nature of the Christian ethic. It blew the Christian message so wide open
that any extreme action, good or evil, could be justified – self-sacrifice,
martyrdom, purity, devotion and concern for others had no greater purchase in
Christ’s official Testament than did racism, violence or absolutism of any
sort. Whoever wrote John’s text was
consciously or unconsciously in the service of organized authority.
…
“Thousands of theologians would later contribute to the capture,
binding and disarming of the original Christian language. Saint Augustine first among them. Perhaps the most effective method they found
was the maintenance of the Bible in Latin, so that the original simple oral
message could only be received in the form of an authorized interpretation by a
priest. Even so, the real victory of
official complexity over simple free language was already long over, having
taken less than four hundred years from when Christ first preached.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards:
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random
House, 1991, pp. 542-543.
They doled out one scrawny lifetime for each of us. During the course of it, we were supposed to
accomplish the mission impossible of achieving personal salvation under the
lash of their clueless incompetence.
They deliberately misinterpreted Christ’s words in a manner as
meaningless as it was redundant.
I wouldn’t entrust them or a hundred generations of their
successors with a used Kleenex, much less my immortal soul.
Yet the holiness of their vocation remains, through their historic
preservation of the Word of God—regardless of their misinterpretation of
such. A proper reinterpretation of the
Word of God they preserved with such devotion, would
restore them to full holiness.
Their arbitrary misinterpretation made blasphemy commonplace,
murder routine and sacrilege inevitable.
Anticipating public defiance against their aberration of Christian
values, they consigned most immortal souls to a five pitchfork Hell to which a
loving God wouldn’t have confined Beelzebub himself.
By means of well-coached moral gymnastics of self-perfection, they
sought to ‘save’ only themselves and their most slavish minions. Since they couldn’t imagine a realistic
heaven, their default option of Hell had to be pretty bad: a collage of
psychobabble nightmares lovingly narrated by weapon mentors. It had to become that, to be marginally worse
than their fully hellish WeaponWorld.
Our ultimate revelation may be the transcendent way the best among
them may actualize their fondest dreams of devotion, once they grasp what is
written below.
Our Father realized that the mission impossible of personal
salvation had turned into a cruel punishment for most of us. We were too weak to take the high road and
had never gotten enough help from His Prophets.
Over and over again, we missed golden opportunities for personal
salvation. With each reincarnation, our task
became more difficult, not less so.
So He sent his only Son to Earth, to show us the only other way
out: Himself, and the last acceptable prayer: the Lord’s Prayer.
Christ’s disciples got it wrong; they got almost everything wrong:
one of Christ’s most insistent teachings.
Weapon hierarchs, like the apostle Paul, John of Revelation, St.
Augustine and their wacko supporters, have compounded this error ever
since. They’ve confabulated the obvious
dead-end lie of real-world salvation through a dubious, hierarch-mediated
verbal contract in this lifetime; followed by some Gott-Mit-Uns nightmare
end-of-the-world. Ruled by a Loving
God? Get real!
That eerily resembles what concentration camp inductees must have
had to face. “Take the line to the right
if I think you’ll work out alright, or the one to the
left if I deem you too feeble for my purpose.”
No self-respecting God would sully Himself so.
The outcome? Two thousand
years of Christian-mediated brutality and hypocrisy, administered by so-called
“Christian” authorities.
Don't tell me about Islam, either.
Once Muslims stop killing each other as Sunni and Shia sectarians or
because they come from different tribes, be sure and get back to me, won’t
you? In the meantime, all Muslims
subsist on the knife-edge of Allah's mercy.
Those who disobey Him shamelessly have nothing to teach me about
Him.
Once we have come together to build God’s House of Peace, we may
discuss the relative merits of each religion.
Until then …
The Perfecti got a much
clearer personal message through to a few lucky Credentes, in absolute defiance of weapon Christianity. Its fanatics burned them alive and stamped
out their teachings just as quickly, for no better reason than to mislead
everyone into the religious dead-end discussed above.
Here below, and in strict accordance with my current belief, I
direct this message freely and clearly to you.
We may reincarnate into Jesus’ life, all of us.
We may take His path after we die; assuming we do reincarnate and this
mechanism applies. If not, you are on
your own.
What you do during this lifetime is your business and no one
else’s—especially not the fundamentalists’ and religious bureaucrats’. We should always have known that to be the
case. I suggest you follow your favorite
religion’s best advice. This might ease
your tormented conscience, on the other side.
Walking around and seeing ourselves through Jesus’ eyeballs, we’ll
be soooo sorry for every wrong we’ve committed
during this life and past ones. We’ll be
infinitely grateful for any act of grace we’ve accrued. Being pious and kind in this lifetime would
be the best preparation for the after-death experience. Those who bang things up during this lifetime
are going to have a worse experience of it.
This I assure you.
The five rules of Islam, carried out in
good faith and without bloody hands, would make excellent preparation for this
supreme challenge. So would any other
pious lifestyle that valid religion would encourage.
Let’s say that you and I chose to disagree about our definitions
of God. You’d stand on point A along
this line of reasoning, (for example, “God does not exist.”) In this example, I would defend point B to
the death, (“God is the clay figurine on my house altar”—just kidding).
Since God is infinite (or as close to it as we can tell, since responsible
for everything in a very big universe and beyond), the God-definition line
stretches out to infinity. As it
stretches out, the gap between your point A and mine B shrinks to nothing, and
our two points tend to merge, no matter how different they may appear to
be.
We use spritzing brain-fat synapses to grasp our limited
understanding of God, guttural human-meat grunts to convey it, and stylized
black stains on chewed-up and desiccated plant fiber or digital pointillism to
memorialize it.
No wonder our words are equally valid and meaningless. We might as well grunt exactly the same noise
– or write the exact opposite of what we just said – for all the accuracy and
truth they might reveal about the perfection, omnipotence and infinity that is God.
So everyone’s definition of God would be equally true and equally
blessed by God—and equally false and cursed with inadequacy. Millennial texts, like the Bible, the Vedas
and the Qran, are written confirmations and memory amplifications of this perfect
absurdity; atheism, its ultimate simplification. Argumentation about this topic should no
longer call for brutality.
Sure thing, dude.
The Perfecti lived such
holy lives, they were revered everywhere they went. Don’t ask me if I could imitate their saintly
lifestyle; I’d fail miserably. I am no
saint, never have been and never will be.
I merely tried to guess the lost script of the Consolamentum. You’re
welcome to play the same guessing game.
Their collegium grew rich from grateful deathbed bequests, yet
remained steadfast. According to
Inquisitorial documents, many Perfecti
gave themselves away during their final torture sessions, by rejecting their
tormentors’ invitation to swear or otherwise taint their souls. That might have spared them from being burned
alive by weapon Christians.
There lingers the sickly-sweet stench of weapon panic and its
lies, and the intoxicating fragrance of God’s Truth. Each unmistakable. No matter how long the former may have sickened
us, the latter will restore us sooner or later.
Today’s Chosen Few should abandon traditional religions and their
mystical dead ends. They may revive
itinerant Cathari communities and restore a superior Tao. It would please me to receive an honest Consolamentum on my deathbed.
Check this out if religion is your calling.
A short first stop would be The
End of the World by Otto Friedrich.
His chapter on “The Birth of the Inquisition” gives you some idea of the
historical and theological convolutions that entangled the Cathari. Zoë
Oldenbourg’s books (available in translation from French to English) offer more
useful information on this topic.
Such subtleties are incidental to Learner purposes. Genuine Perfecti
should organize themselves into itinerant orders, in strict and clear-cut
obedience to the Word of Christ. They
would heed His straightforward instruction from the Book of Matthew, and in so
doing, serve as useful role models for the peace religions we require.
Expect equivalent miracles to emerge from other world religions. Their best adherents have approached similar
ideals of devotion, with greater or lesser success. Every religion has conceived and aborted one
or more superior heresies, for example: Orphism, the Essenes, the Sufi, Jain,
Gnosis, Quakers, the Therapeutae and
Buddhism’s ‘vehicles.’ No doubt every
religion has promoted some peaceful offshoot more profound than the gangrenous
stumps we drag behind us today. We have
merely to revive the best of them and use them to replace current ones, by
definition, the sickest.
After all, would you rather – of your own volition – that one of the worst weapon mentors in history served as our children’s chaplain? Even if their survival required a million times less weapon mentality than he wants?
(Recited during the Middle Ages, by Languedoc Cathari perfecti during a deathwatch, much as Buddhist monks would recite from The Tibetan Book of the Dead during a deathwatch).
This poem is entirely of my invention. I dedicate it to my father who died before I could recite it to him, to all those who confront the uncertainties of life and death heroically, without the least spiritual shield, and to everyone who must die one more time, before they may apply it…
Be
not afraid,
Oh
Nobly Born,
For
you are Saved.
Christ
will shoulder
Your
Karmic Burden,
No
matter how damning
It
may seem to you.
Breathe
deeply,
Breathe
softly,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Close
your eyes
And
be at peace.
Die
easily, sweetly,
And
be at peace,
This
one last time.
Let
your soul escape
From
this failing body,
With
confidence, hope, and joy eternal;
As
you would approach
Your
own wedding,
As
Christ taught us.
Oh
Nobly Born!
You
have bailed out of a million billion bodies
Before
this one.
In
as many death agonies,
Many,
many lifetimes
Full
of pain, fear and anxiety
Made
up your destiny
Until
this day.
You
are free from all that now.
After
you have freed yourself
From
this mortal shell,
Like
a pilot would bail out
Of
his burning fighter plane,
Your
discarnate, drifting soul
Will
cruise space and time
Until
you tire of its hard vacuum,
Dusty
dull silence and drudgery.
You
may revisit,
Like
a jaded old tourist,
All
the stars in heaven,
And
watch universes
Take
birth, flare out and die
Of
intense beauty.
Or
simply listen to sweet birdsong,
And
watch the flowers grow,
From
the rising to the setting of the sun.
You
may run into
Beasts,
Angels and Daemons
Reflecting
your own
Desires,
Hopes and Fears,
Whom
you may choose
To
touch and be touched by,
For
good or ill.
You
may tarry here on Earth,
Wander
its homes and range,
Haunt
places familiar or strange,
Revisit
old offspring and lovers,
Lost
and heartsick,
For
as long as you can bear it.
You
will soon tire of this,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Sooner
or later,
Your
soul will long,
More
and more urgently,
For
another carnal life.
You
will fall back into life,
Free-fall
backward into life,
As
a rock seeks its depth,
And
the water, its flow,
Deep
in the current of life
Irresistibly,
Worse
than the need to pee,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Once
your starving soul
Begins
to yearn for life,
You
will defer your return,
Review
impatiently
Interchangeable
conceptions
For
worthy rebirth
Into
this world.
Oh
Nobly Born!
Seek
the unmistakable psychic beacons
Of
Mary's Immaculate Conception
And
of Christ’s Resurrection!
Heavy
runway beacons,
Flare-strobed
at both ends,
In
a lifeless landscape,
Furtive
couplings and dismal deaths,
Otherwise
mournful, carnal and gray.
Ignore
the many tiny tidal tugs
Of
Karma, Familiarity, Desire and Fear
That
will mislead you to seek rebirth
In
a mortal infant,
A
familiar setting,
Among
your familiars,
And
back onto the Wheel of Desire and Death.
Oh
Nobly Born!
Abandon
your family,
Your
beloved friends,
Your
many homelands,
And
all your possessions.
Take
up His cross instead.
Be
ye born again onto His Spirit,
As
into this vibrant flesh.
Recall
His many parables:
They
make perfect sense in this context,
And
none in any other.
Grasp
His lifeline,
Relive
His lifetime,
That
sacred Life
You
could have led
Had
you held true faith.
But
God has mercy,
Even
unto the merciless
Even
unto evil.
Even
unto you,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Review
and repent
Your
irredeemable sins
In
the perfect light
Of
His Life and Agony.
Oh
Nobly Born!
How
you will wish
You
had obeyed God to the letter
And
submitted to Him wholly—
So
cruelly will your conscience
Torment
you.
Your
recall of many self-betrayals
Will
last His whole Lifetime.
For
thirty and some long years,
Every
sin you committed
You
will repent a hundredfold.
Every
good deed,
A
meager balm
For
your sin-flayed soul.
Your
sins will rouse you
To
speak His Words in true faith
And
see the world through His shining eyes
With
divine clarity,
The
beam finally removed from your eye.
Be
brave
When
they betray and crucify you.
Wear
His crown of thorns,
Grateful
for this painful distraction
From
your unworthiness.
Oh
Nobly Born.
Your
pain is almost over.
And
His mercy
Might
even spare you
From
that which must follow
For
Him.
His
daylong Agony
Will
seem to you the last twinge
Of
your endless torment.
His
Calvary, climbing Golgotha,
The
last, faltering steps
Of
your ascent to Heaven.
No
more rebirths for you
On
the Wheel of Desire and Death.
Then
you may travel with Him
Direct
to Heaven,
That
very afternoon,
You
and the repentant thief, Dismas.
There,
you will find God
Awaiting
you:
His
only Son
And
His companions,
Welcome
prodigies.
And
rejoin those
Who’ve
flung themselves
From
the Wheel of Desire and Death,
And
taken up His Cross instead.
He
promised to keep
This
path is open for us,
His
children.
Where
you will rejoin your familiars,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Sooner
or later,
After
one less death,
One
more or many,
They
will follow or precede you
Along
this path.
Do
not trouble yourself
With
considerations
Of
space and time,
Of before
and after,
Of
singularity and multiplicity,
And
which soul belongs to which body.
The
weakness of your faith
Blinds
you to the fact
That
you might pluck out your eyeball
Or
chop off your arm,
Should
they offend you,
Without
a care,
So
little do those things matter
In
the make-believe that is your life
That
seems vital to you.
You
cannot fathom
Real
matters of this Earth
In
the light of Truth,
Much
less those of Spirit.
Have
but a little more faith,
Just
a shred of hope,
Oh
Nobly Born,
And
you will be Saved.
No
one can take this from you,
No
one can talk you down,
Or
extract it from you,
Neither
by force,
By
sentiment
Nor
by persuasion.
Tell
them anything they want to hear,
It
will not matter.
You
will die in any case
And
thus be
Perfectly,
miraculously and absolutely free
To
choose Paradise,
Or
to climb back
Upon
the Wheel.
Indeed,
you might choose to come back
Or
might be asked to, nicely,
Help
your brethren find the way,
Bring
more lost children
Into
the arms of God,
Oh
Bodhisattva.
And
you could yearn for another return,
To
the good old days of desire and ignorance:
Another
lesson,
A
chance to do it the hard way;
Or
merely cringe
Before
Christ's fated Agony and yours,
Or
your unworthiness for such an honor;
And
submit once again
To
the Wheel.
You
are perfectly free to choose,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Great
the Father,
Great
the Son
And
the Holy Spirit,
Our
Comforter
That
Jesus promised us.
For
it is through Them
That
all are Saved
Who
choose to be,
Who
look and see,
Who
listen and hear.
Fear
nothing, any longer,
Oh
Nobly Born.
Everyone
must die,
And
die again, without end,
Until
we are reborn and saved,
As
soon as we choose to be,
We,
the ready,
As
promised.
(The
priests have left the room…)
Matthew 6-9, repeat alone…
Let me begin by burying myself alive in my own identity politics—if only in the name of full disclosure and perfect simplicitude.
If you are emotionally invested in your own identity politics, you may dismiss me as just another of those soon-dead American guys: rich, white and straight.
Unclean!
If you are just as fed up as I am by this trivia, please jump to my discussion of identify politics in general, much more interesting than my insignificant particulars.
Soon dead, give or take the decades you’re probably looking forward to, while I look back on them.
Rich: give or take the 95% of planetary wealth we should be sharing at the grass roots, but aren’t, since we’re too busy squabbling over our precious identity positions. Instead, we should be cooperating in the struggle against monolithic weapon mentality. It never bothers with such trivia, except to entangle us deeper in it, rip us off royally and send children off to perish.
Somewhere, sooner or later, pandemic weapon mentality will burn down homes and disappear anonymous victims. Be it by nukes and scalar weapons, by mortar rounds into the neighborhood, or up-close and personal with fire brands and mahchehtteh, take your pick.
Someone wrote: “If the oil runs out and food stops getting shipped into London, it would turn into Darfur within a few weeks.” The same could be said of any community that relies on supermarkets for sustenance―the world’s breadbaskets included.
I’d say I am comfortably off, if not rich. I have worked at unimportant jobs when I had to, and enjoyed a few years of adult leisure while I was young enough to enjoy them. Prolonged leisure is wasted on the elderly, while that free time is a vital for young victims of first love and those raising babies.
I have composed this text for free and by myself, as an act of love and sweet artistic compulsion. The rest of the time, I worked without enthusiasm. The best jobs on WeaponWorld involve bailing out the Titanic with a bucket instead of a colander.
If I hadn’t been so well off, I couldn’t have found enough free time to furnish you this text, now could I? You will find that people who make the most interesting and decisive discoveries are neither starving nor obscenely rich nor necessarily dependent for their livelihoods on their invention.
White, even though I carry the same fifty million genes we share in common. On official forms, I’d rather register myself as “Race: Other”. Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Jean-Marie Le Pen and their small town rabble are ‘White’: the color of chalk and death. They’re welcome to that label, since their monstrous example has turned it into an insult. Dead or alive, I will never identify with their rotten kind.
I consider all the races my brothers, sisters, ancestors and children; none are not. Nothing is more brutal than a fratricidal fight. I suppose I should include those “white” freaks, too. Patience, patience…
I get more of a rush from the designation Other. I celebrate the wandering Bantu, Maya, Berber, Mongol and Bushmen genes that grace my genotype, like any other human’s. Mongrel stock is the strongest, as any good farmer will tell you. Go ask a weed.
American: actually 50% French, 25% German and a quarter Irish. My parents were born in Madagascar and in Queens; and I myself, in the American Hospital on the outskirts of Paris. In other words, I’m a Yankee Doodle hybrid, a cosmopolitan internationalist and proud of it. I spent my youth defending America against French and international bigots of my own age and older, and the rest of my life defending France and the rest of the world against the same kind of bigot in America. How countless they are, those imagination-starved bigots who fester like maggots everywhere! And how sick I am of their cud-chewing identity politics.
Since the Kennedy assassination and the war in Vietnam, I have spent my life agonizing over just how despicable America had to become to force me into the hills bearing an automatic weapon. I’ve also spent my life as a grateful public dependent (army brat) and a proud public servant. Life is paradox. I’ve come to fear I might be just another good German and submit, in the name of peace, to the worst fascism that Republican fatheads can dream up. Like hell!
I am just as ambivalent about being Franco-American as about anything else. The last minority those American crypto-racists can insult safely in public—at least while I’m not around. A noble and ambitious breed, those Franco-Americans: scions of the richest, most powerful, most reactionary and backward-looking nations on Earth … a drag on international treaties of peace, human rights and the environment, instead of being their foremost sponsors. Birthplace and nursery of most magnificent ideals humanity ever aspired to, as well as the foulest deeds carried out in their name. Just as capable of amplifying those ideals, if only they so desired. We should be frankly leading here; everyone except those opposed to those ideals, who should be managed very carefully.
German: Mozart and Himmler; Kultur, pretzel logic, science and civilization … and the constant stink of military latrines. And Irish, finally, to cook a fine, mad, mulligan stew from all this malarkey.
Man: guilty as charged, last I checked.
Straight: how happy my wife and other pretty women make me, each in her own fine way!
Or, as I'd rather wear on a printed T-shirt:
Learner:
Not of this species,
Not from this planet.
So sue me.
I realize that the easiest way to make a fool of myself (besides writing an autobiographical chapter) is to generalize about human ethnicity and race. As if that would hold me back!
As far as I’m concerned, the terms bigot and identity politician are synonymous. It is merely a question of which sub-identity you choose to be prejudiced for or against, and how passionately you believe you would benefit by harming the Other―while everyone plays no-brain, zero-sum games (what I must win, you must lose).
By now, you should realize that I have nothing good to say about identity politics – having suffered from its backhand slaps all my life – and much to criticize. Walk away, if you’re so inclined, or stick around and hear me out. Just recall that every time you are excluded, punished and denied something important for reasons other than your merit and the content of your character (as the great Martin Luther King so aptly put it), someone else’s identity politics or your own were at play. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Any conclusion that one sex is responsible for peace while the other sustains war, is another weapon myth and a hopeless simplification.
A partial (cursory and biased) list of names might help refute this prejudice: Nehanda of Zimbabwe and the Berber Kahina, Queen Ya Asantewa, Catherine the Great of Russia, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth the Great of England, Joan of Arc, Maria Theresa, Rebecca Felton, Margaret Thatcher, Trung Trac, Trung Nhi, Phung Thi Chin, Trieu Au, Tsu Hsi (Cixi, the Empress Dowager of China), Mulan, Zenobia, Boudicca, Semiramis and Indira (versus) Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Ashoka and Martin Luther King. Forgive me if I left out your favorite female conqueror and peaceable man.
The ultimate power of women should reside in their right to forbid, categorically, the stupidest decisions men make. If that consideration were obeyed, the worst decisions would never have happened and would not be possible in the future.
While most alpha-dominant males rely on aggression to begin with, many women tend toward cooperation and consensus at their own expense, at least until their family is in danger. Then, look out! At that point, alpha-dominant female aggression is much more virulent than the stereotypical male version. Once their alpha-dominant menfolk had fallen in battle, female leaders often held leadership positions and fought battles, sieges and wars of annihilation to successful conclusion (or extinction).
Until recently, progressive leaders have recruited more females than the forces of patriarchal reaction. Nowadays, those reactionaries have discovered they can recruit raving maniacs just as easily among women and minority members, as from among rich, old, white coots.
Progressives should abandon their diffidence and replace it with the unconditional ferocity of females defending their young. “They’re threatening the kids; let’s go get ‘em!”
Our schools are pillars of weapon regimentation; to a great extent, they are run by women. In the absence of peace mentality, female chauvinists might differ slightly from their male counterparts, but rule no more wisely. Even though many women fill modern military service roles, their leadership remains marginal. Grooming women for war has exploded the female criminal population.
“These examples are not intended to suggest that women have played no role inside the structures of power. There have been remarkable queens, heads of government and ministers, just as there have been scientists, painters, writers and so on. Today, more than ever, women are occupying positions of influence. However, in the past they have been the exceptions to the rule and were usually obliged to hold on to their power by deforming themselves into honorary men or into magnified archetypes of the female who manipulated men. It still is not clear that women can successfully become part of the established structures without accepting those deformations.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 35.
Like other pit-falls of identity politics, the gender-based explanation of institutional degeneracy is merely divisive. The crux lies elsewhere. Why dispute the relative merits of pacifism over feminism―or any other identity issue, for that matter? That would an exercise as pointless as declaring one leg of a chair the most important, or one tree in the forest.
What I mentioned about women applies to every abused minority: racial, ethnic, religious and sexual. Women rarely constitute a minority, but weapon managers mistreat them as such, (part of the Plant Trap, recall). The existence of harmless minorities has never validated persecution. Such abuse just turns harmless minorities into dangerous ones: another global intention of weapon management.
In any case, the ultimate female political power resides in vetoing male initiatives before they’ve gone off the deep end. Behind every successful man stands a woman sharp enough to tell him when to quit while he’s ahead. We have ignored this authority at our peril. I repeat myself here because this idea is so important.
Another weapon myth, upheld on both sides of the aisle, is that homosexuals form some kind of progressive vanguard. This myth leads to a giant misunderstanding – shared alike by reactionary homophobes and progressive gays – that one must somehow be homoerotic to entertain progressive ideals.
Gay progressives maintain this mistake to encourage themselves; reactionaries, to tar progressives with a label that's particularly abhorrent to them, of being gay. Both parties realize they are lying to themselves. It’s obvious that there are just as many reactionary gays as there are progressive ones, and a lot more progressive straights than progressive gays.
The same could be said about the progressive beliefs of any other identity group, compared to the remainder.
The only difference is that reactionary gays must shut up about their erotic preferences that their reactionary allies loathe; whereas progressives of all sorts reject this intolerance and neither silence nor banish their homosexual allies.
There is no point in giving up on general progress in favor of one’s advancement or that of one’s narrow identity group. Even to the point of surrendering potent progressive symbols, like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, so that gays could adorn themselves with it exclusively; and losing vital battles like the 2004 Presidential election over whether gays may enjoy same-sex marriage ceremonies immediately.
Whose mucus membranes get to rub up against whose, with full public approval: that priority would be fine and harmless, if we did not face a thousand more crucial ones. But this non-issue serves weapon mentality as a perfect distraction from other, more important topics.
Congratulations on your self-indulgent identity politics! Just don’t dare claim to be progressive! You might as well have embezzled progressive funds to fly yourself and your buddies First Class to Maui. Like Bush to Bin Laden and vice versa, the reactionaries thank you for your approach: “We couldn’t have gotten away with our power-grab without your assistance.”
The same argument applies to people whose minority status is based on some other criterion. For example, the politics of pro-choicers and right-to-lifers. Who cares how many adults and children get cluster-bombed while you hash out this other argument! Unbelievable and inadmissible on any planet but this one.
We are progressive because we believe in Progress, not because we belong to some random identity group supposed to be superior. Those who side with progressives merely to advance their downtrodden cause, who would sacrifice important progressive issues to further those of their own identity group, and who turn into raving conservatives, the moment they get the upper hand, are just reactionary wolves in sheep’s clothing.
And we are all Learners, regardless of our identity position. All of us! Whether we choose to loathe or admire some other group, its members are Learners just like us. Every Learner should be just as dear to every other one, by definition.
I am only certain of the following. I was born without wanting to and will die without wanting to. Against my better judgment, I was parachuted onto this planet. It was colonized quite a while ago by an overwhelming majority of simpletons, has been governed by shadists in love with their corruption, and endowed with a culture fit only for complacent slackers, and is doomed to deliberate self-destruction. According to the same herd of hopeless idiots, no other alternative is ‘realistic.’ It would take a lengthy series of miracles to get around so much institutionalized stupidity.
In the meantime, I entertain myself by learning and refusing to learn everything I can. As everyone does. Find me someone who doesn’t. We are all Learners.
The induction of women into modern worker and warrior status is a direct result of weapon technology.
Weapons had become terribly lethal by the late 1800’s, so much so that universal (male) conscription had to be adopted to meet enormous body counts. Weapon lethality has multiplied a thousand-fold, since. Thus, modern combat demands more and more bodies of women, of the elderly and of children to top off the stack. These so-called non-combatants) find themselves more and more often among the shock troops and shocked amputees of modern combat.
This exponential upshot of "non-combatant" casualties is nothing new. The weapon myth of risk-free, non-combatant status – that warriors reserve mayhem for their armed adversaries – is just a weapon myth and nothing more. On the contrary, many ancient societies annihilated entire nations: man, woman and child.
Modern warfare kills tens and thousands of civilians for every soldier it kills. It is easier to gun down people who cower in the crossfire and don’t shoot back; or simply deny them food and other necessities that the military can always find good reason to expropriate.
Face it; we are all combatants. The question becomes: are we Learner combatants, properly armed and motivated, who stand a chance at legitimate self-defense? Or a disarmed rabble of human livestock ripe for police-state slaughter? Carefully divide-and-conquered by the self-sabotage of our identity politics? You tell me.
A fundamental rule of victory is Concentration of Effort. Those who try to defend everything, defend nothing; those who attack everywhere, win nowhere. Instead of attacking in penny packets across the length of the enemy’s line, or defending every point with equal resolve and exposure, one must find a weak spot in the enemy’s layout and fling a strong force against it. This reserve is accumulated by skimping dangerously elsewhere. Once the enemy’s line is shattered, additional reserves must be hurled through the gap. These powerful reserves can also serve to counter-attack any assault the enemy makes, assuming he thinks himself more powerful than we.
Weapon dissidents have abandoned this ideological holism. Instead, they have taken to defending their pet identity positions preferentially, thus forsaking all-important concentration of effort and any hope of success. Thanks to narrow-minded, self-serving identity politics, weapon elites have become the only minority left in power.
We have failed to square off against our worst sins of racism, sexism and ageism. Instead, we've allowed professional equivocators to flounder, and political compromisers to sidestep human rights, with the poise of long practice.
I ask you: what have identity politics brought us? True, we have universal suffrage. But we also have George W. Bush and his inestimable peers brought to presidential power by ‘universal suffrage.’ Ditto every other social benefit you can name: all of them radioactive from the fallout of weapon mentality.
I beg you to think this through more carefully: who are your real opponents and what are your real political goals?
Why not uphold every education quota and equal opportunity mandate until each minority and gender achieved proportional representation? For every minority percentile within a population, the same percentage of minority candidates should become judges, executives, business people, police, governors, legislators and professionals—or chaos could loom from their absence. Simple merit would promote the best-qualified from each identity group. Mediocrities, incompetents and especially sociopaths would have a much harder time justifying their authority, in the absence of their skewed identity politics.
Others claim that the adherents of the USA, the Western or Northern Hemisphere, the white race, Judeo-Christianity or some other dominant tribe are responsible for every social evil. Meanwhile, the claimants' people consist of blameless victims and vengeful terrorists, completely justified.
In perceived environments of dearth, those who play zero-sum games form small, coherent groups of Winners that can browbeat a majority of pre-defined Losers. The leaders ('Winners') of each abused minority, point to the ethnic majority as the source of their Losers' ills.
Racial segregation is a sorting device of this kind, as are other segregations: national, religious and ethnic – largely cosmetic. Usually, a majority of “minority” Losers is set up to hate each other, even though they have more in common with each other than with their respective Winners.
In the end, info elites of every kind abuse info proletarians of every kind, especially their own. Rich whites have always exploited poor whites (practice makes perfect). Reactionary Hutus hunted down every progressive Hutu before they turned to massacre their Tutsi neighbors. Given the chance, reactionary Tutsis would do likewise with their own progressives.
Replace your own identity militants in the same statement. Note how well those shoes fit them.
In the real world, human agglomerations select their leadership from their individual members. From then on, those organizations do exactly what they intended to do from the beginning – otherwise, what they had to do, given constraints beyond their control – insofar nature permits, accompanied by their leader’s cheerleading or despite his displeasure. Tolstoy concluded as much. Any boost of personal leadership beyond this limit must be absurd.
More often than not, this selection is based on pheromones, looks, birthright and self-selection for aggression. The political charisma of an Alexander or Napoleon, and the sexual attraction of a Casanova or Cleopatra, may have been the outcomes of irresistible body odor; and other factors, mere reinforcements or detractions. We are attracted to them instinctively, the way a hive of bees would be.
I begin to suspect that those personalities so noteworthy during their era in history, might have attracted many souls in free-fall after death, to reincarnate into their famous life. We could assume that these reincarnations transcended time and space, and thus didn’t need to be sequential in time or nearby in space (i.e., the supposition would be irrelevant that one could only reincarnate in a body born after your death and close to it). This may be the source of their charisma: millions of souls reincarnated in them and resuming life behind their eyeballs.
Don’t be so quick to put down all those crazies who call themselves Napoleon or Cleopatra. They might be telling us some version the truth, and it might be we the ones alienated from this truth.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao may have born a scent just as attractive, if not more so, than history’s most saintly sovereign. Military history demonstrates that this political perfume and sanity do not necessarily correlate—and perhaps the opposite: only psychopaths and sociopaths might benefit from it.
Or it might be a purely negative trait: the ability to suppress the bodily release of stress hormones and their unmistakable scent, the absence of which would soothe and attract normal people in stressful situations. I am just guessing along these lines.
This process of holistic and subliminal democracy occurs in most human hierarchies, regardless of other details—and completely overlooked by political science. It is often irrational, counterintuitive and counterproductive; but remains sovereign.
There may be another basis for racial and ethnic prejudice, in addition to the odor-mediated one or just a bit more subtle. Positive or negative, this bias might be based on immunological and neurological factors, instead of (or in addition to) sociological ones.
The human body could be seen as a dusty rag mop that releases clouds of dead cells every time it moves, breathes or is touched. Rather than appearing as a rubbery, cohesive covering; skin consists of layers of cells, the outermost of which are no longer attached to the body—ready to fall off and scatter at the slightest provocation.
Let’s assume that each of these cells contains one or more distinctive markers: trace biochemicals that identify the individual it was attached to: their race, hygiene habits, diet and/or sexual attributes among other ethnic or behavioral distinctions.
Nowadays, when people are crowded together or enclosed in poorly ventilated spaces, they breathe in each other’s detached skin cells. Personal prejudice (race, ethnic, etc.) might be a very subtle form of immune reaction to those cells’ biochemical markers, trace elements of which might cross the blood-brain barrier in minute quantities and trigger a fight-or-flight reaction; perhaps just as easily as those of family affinity, clan loyalty and sexual attraction.
Under certain conditions, human crowds start acting like one collective organism beyond the rational control of its separate members. Likewise, groups of females housed together tend to synchronize their estrogen cycles and have their periods simultaneously.
Biochemical, neurological and immunological mechanisms, like those listed here, might offer a more accurate description of these behavior patterns. Humans may react to these biochemical markers, the way insects react to theirs. Human versions may be as much more complex, compared to theirs, as our societies are more complex than theirs.
It may be that ‘charismatic’ people and great historical leaders retain Type-O trace markers in their skin cells, accepted by all and sundry, that foster obedience and adulation.
On the other hand, violent bigots might suffer from an ‘allergic reaction’ to trace markers of their target ethnic group. Their prejudice might be a symptom of a subtle immunological disease, enhanced and reinforced by societal norms of prejudicial judgment and behavior.
This text suggests how to rationalize this process. We might have a better time by quickening Learning and self-selection for excellence in our topics of passion, making use of the world’s Virtual Agora to filter these neurophysiologic factors from our politics. Otherwise, we could acknowledge, study, put them to the best possible use and regulate their misuse—as with all our other peace technologies.
Until not so long ago, in the American South, white bigots sat around doing nothing much worthwhile, waiting for someone black to say or do something forbidden, (there were thousands of opportunities to do something wrong). At that point, they could vent their pent up rage, mob their chosen victim and hurt them real bad. Nowadays, the least creative people of every minority sit around doing not much of anything, waiting for someone outside their narrow identity niche to say or do something they might disapprove of, and try to ruin that person’s life. They are not much good for anything else.
Bigots are racists are xenophobes. Shadism doesn’t give a damn about the skin color, bone structure, habits, origins or religions of bigot aggressors and their victims—just as long as they’re different and vulnerable. Sociopaths and their imitators (the rest of us at our worst) need victims with no way out; racism serves perfectly.
No whole race or nation figured out how to promote racial equality. Only enlightened and heroic individuals have managed to do so, from across two or more races―often interracial soulmates and their mestizo children. Their example inspired social acceptance or triggered their extinction.
On the other hand, racial segregation is not inflicted by a few brazen individuals, but by an entire race seeking unfair advantage from some coincidental strategic benefit. The same applies to any other identity bias including religion, sexual orientation and ethnicity.
Who would be the worst racist? The dominant bigot who flays his soul and inflicts misery on others, his obvious equals? Or his victim seething with repressed anger and waiting for payback? Does it matter? The poison they share is still poison. The point is to discover the antidote, not assign blame or score points.
Racial equality comes about through personal enlightenment based on private experience: "That fine person of the other race and his noble bearing showed me they aren’t all as bad as that… That man is my partner; back off and quit insulting him!"
Racial bias and segregation are based on cultural norms perverted by identity politics: "Since I was a kid, I’ve been taught that they are all worthless scum. My experience with them has confirmed that fact because I forgot every occurrence that contradicted it."
Identity politics is the central problem. Those who base their personal value (superiority) on identity politics are dangerously self-deluded. Being proud to belong to a certain identity group, that is fine. Feeling superior about it and debasing others for no other reason—that is not.
Personal responsibility is the solution. Those who base their actions and beliefs on a personal assessment of each individual, promote racial equality. In so doing, they demonstrate the nobility of their own identity position. On the other hand, racists make their race look bad, as well as all their other ideals, no matter how valid.
There is no escaping this truth; no matter how comforting its denial may seem to you. If you hate the words I write, feel free to call me a racist. That may make you feel better. Others have done so, confirming my argument. The racist is you, and the racism is your precious identity position, at least until you decide to change your beautiful mind.
What does all this have to do with the current ethnic situation in France? Here is what I propose.
Ethnic bias is a cultural phenomenon based on individual belief. Ethnic equality is a series of spontaneous decisions by individuals, helped along by cultural norms. This reversal of dominant and secondary sources of belief is very important.
One can reduce racism by introducing laws and institutions that contradict it, or strengthen it by proposing the opposite. But we can’t create equality unless we permit people to persuade themselves. Racism may be overcome by force and law; equality is not so easily enforced.
Human misery and inequality have this in common. Government can elevate or diminish them at will, since they are predictable, quantifiable and vulnerable to institutional meddling.
Human happiness and equality have the opposite in common. They exist within the mind of the individual directly involved, and don’t have any real meaning as far as government is concerned, or vulnerability to being raised or lowered by government decree.
Here is what happens when one attempts to force equality. Dutiful female students are forbidden to obey the wisdom of their religion and parents. Forbidding them to wear the veil, in the name of equality: what pure folly!
I beg my French readers to grasp this fact before unanticipated consequences overwhelm them. The ultimate podium of public equality is the guillotine—to which the French must readily admit.
When it comes to human happiness and freedom, and government’s obligation to (do something with them, essentially indefinable and absurd – Defend them? Support them? Push on a rope with them?); those are favorite topics of George W. Bush and others with nothing better to talk about.
That brings us to an interesting fork in the trail through this linguistic bramble. Misery is not the opposite of happiness. It can be quantified (how much food and water have you had today; how long have you been in pain; how many nights did you have to sleep out in the rain?). Happiness cannot be quantified in this manner – go ask a suicidal heir to fortune or panhandler whistling just because his afternoon is so fine.
Similarly, equality is not the opposite of discrimination. Would equality be the same between the following pairs: identical twins, brother and sister, good friends, total strangers and members of two races? Describe the difference in twenty-five words or less.
Whereas discrimination: “They are all inferior to my people,” that is pretty straightforward.
So what are the linguistic opposites?
· Misery – Satisfaction
· Happiness – Sadness
· Equality – Unfairness
· Discrimination – Proper Judgment
For the moment, I have no idea what conclusion this tabulation must lead to, but I suspect it is vital when discussing government functions.
The trick would be, never again to support racist aggressors, whatever their identity position—even if it were the same as our own and thus very tempting.
It would be better for everyone concerned if we belonged to a group much larger than theirs, more confident, influential and benevolent; one we believed in, that we could count on to forbid us from meddling in identity aggression and that shielded us from it just as dependably.
Up ‘til now, our basic pattern of political conflict has been between in-groups and out-groups. Every Learner should rally to one cherished in-group, then invite into that in-group every info proletarian and ex-info elite, leaving no one behind unless he or she wished to remain so peacefully. As for those who wish to, brutally: infantile identification, exclusion from authority and lifetime treatment.
No community, no matter how well conceived, could immunize itself from ingenious, ambitious and persistent Conspirators of Greed. In a weapon civilization, racial politics would be as futile as gender politics, transsexuality and any other identify position. It is just as pointless to distinguish the skin tones, riches and sexual proclivities of the oppressed, as those of the oppressor. If the situation were reversed and previous victims achieved dominance, a similar bell curve of abuse and cooperation would emerge.
If you claim membership to a minority and assume your leaders would behave less disgracefully than the current crop, you would only need to review the long-term outcome of every weapon revolution to verify your error. If you shifted your scrutiny further back in history, you would be horrified to discover your own minority dominant somewhere and just as brutal to its subordinates. The only exception: PeaceWorld.
Learners will not seek a dominance limited to themselves. Instead, they will look for commonalties everyone may share fearlessly. Learning is a commonality every human may share in mutual peace and abundance. We would stop talking about replacing one information elite with another (that conformed better to our identity position). Instead, we would create a Learner Commonwealth that upheld universal equality. No one would be left outside, who would rather come in from the cold.
“Stranger: Then you think that it is a waste
of time, talent, and pecuniary means for the poor to contend in opposition to
the rich and powerful?
“Founder:
I do; because if these who are poor today become powerful … they will then oppress
those who may become poor by the change, and act just as the rich and powerful
have always done ... from the beginning to the present moment.” Robert Owen, Dialogue, 18-20. Taken
from The
Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A.L. Morton, 1962, Monthly Review Press, NY, p. 125.
“A myth is a unit of imagination that makes it possible for
a human being to accommodate two worlds.
It reconciles the contradictions of these two worlds in a workable
fashion and holds open the way between them…
“Myth makes it possible to live with what you cannot endure.
“And if the myth has been learned well, it becomes a word—a
single word that switches on the whole system of comforting delusions…
“The function of a myth is to provide a logical model capable
of overcoming a contradiction. The myth
proves that things have always been like this, that things will never
change.” Antjie Krog, Country of
My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, Times Books,
Random House, New York, 1998, p. 250.
You might find the following conclusion alarming. Our most cherished social truths are weapon myths opposed to peace. The weapon/peace dialectic corrodes human conscience, the way sugary saliva melts tooth enamel and acid rain dissolves marble.
As I toss these myths up and bat them out to you, track their trajectories fearlessly and step under them; don’t duck your head. Only your reasoned intuition can replace the measured platitudes of weapon mentality.
We have a book called On War, but no On Peace. That lop-sidedness betrays our collective ignorance, apathy and stupidity.
According to Karl von Clausewitz, author of the respected text On War, (that ultimate exercise in weapon pedantry): “War is a continuation of diplomacy (foreign policy) by other means.” We might as well conclude that agriculture is a continuation of candy bars by other means. Check out the fortunes spent preparations for combat, even in peacetime, versus the pittance paid to professional diplomats. Warfare is a continuation of weapon technology in its purest form, our conversion of society’s potential energy into kinetic mayhem.
He concluded as follows in his chapter, “The Purposes and Means of War”:
“We may occupy a country completely, but hostilities can be
renewed again in the interior, or perhaps with allied help. This of course can also happen after the peace
treaty, but this only shows that not every war necessarily leads to a final
decision and settlement. But even if
hostilities should occur again, a peace treaty will always extinguish a mass of
sparks that might have gone on quietly smouldering. Further, tensions are slackened, for lovers
of peace (and they abound among every people under all circumstances) will then
abandon every thought of further action.
Be that as it may, we must always consider that with the conclusion of
peace the purpose of the war has been achieved and its business is at an end.” On War, Oxford Classics, p. 32.
If even the great Clausewitz was forced to conclude that every war must end with a peace treaty, then we are forced to conclude that World War will never end without unanimous signatures on a global peace treaty.
“In peace time, the relations between two diplomats are like
relations between two merchants. While
the merchants trade in copper or transistors, the diplomats’ transactions
involve boundaries, spheres of influence, commercial concessions and a variety
of other issues which they have in common.
A foreign minister or diplomat is a merchant who bargains on behalf of
his country. He is both buyer and
seller, though he buys and sells privileges and obligations rather than
commodities. The treaties he signs are
simply more courteous versions [Author’s note: and much less well regulated] of
commercial contracts.
“The difficulty in diplomacy, as in commerce, is to find an
acceptable price for the transaction.
Just as the price of merchandise such as copper roughly represents the
point where the supply of copper balances the demand for it, the price of a
transaction in diplomacy roughly marks the point at which one nation’s
willingness to pay matches the price demanded by the other. The diplomatic market however is not as
sophisticated [well regulated] as the mercantile market. Political currency is not so easily measured
as economic currency. Buying and selling
in the diplomatic market is much closer to barter, and so resembles an ancient
bazaar in which the traders have no accepted medium of exchange. In diplomacy each nation has the rough
equivalent of a selling price – a price which it accepts when it sells a
concession – and the equivalent of a buying price. Sometimes these prices are so far apart that
a transaction vital to both nations cannot be completed peacefully; they cannot
agree on the price of the transaction.
The history of diplomacy is full of such crises. …
“… In a diplomatic
crisis the currency of one nation or alliance is out of alignment with that of
the others. These currencies are simply
the estimates which each nation nourishes about its relative bargaining
power. These estimates are not easy for
an outsider to assess or to measure; and yet these estimates exist clearly in
the minds of the ministers and diplomats who bargain.
“…
“A nation facing a payments crisis can measure the extent to
which it is living beyond its means. As
the months pass by, moreover, it can measure whether its remedies have been
effective, for the statistics of its balance of payments are an accurate guide
to the approach of a crisis and the passing of crisis. On the other hand, a deficit in international
power is not so easy to detect. A nation
with an increasing deficit in international power may not even recognize its
weaknesses. A nation may so mistake its
bargaining power that it may make the ultimate appeal to war, and then learn
through defeat in warfare to accept a humbler assessment of its bargaining
position.
“…
“In diplomacy some nations for a long period can live far
beyond their means: to live beyond their means is to concede much less than
they would have to concede if the issue was resolved by force. A government may be unyielding in
negotiations because it predicts that its adversary does not want war. It may be unyielding because it has an
inflated idea of its own military power.
Or it may be unyielding because to yield to an enemy may weaken its
standing and grip within its own land.
Whereas an endangered nation facing a currency crisis cannot escape some
punishment, in a diplomatic crisis it can completely escape punishment, so long
as the rival nation of alliance does not insist on war. Thus diplomacy may become more unrealistic,
crises may become more frequent, and ultimately the tension and confusion may
end in war.” Geoffrey Blainey, The
Causes of War, The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, first published
by Macmillan in London, 1973, pp. 115-117.
“The real cause of war, on the contrary, is seen most
clearly when it is studied in correlation with the decrease in profits, which, of
course, may itself be due to the increase in population and to the diminishing
productivity of the soil, but which may also manifest itself independently of
these two phenomena as a direct effect of the diminishing productivity of labor
[or current technology] … In other
words, as Proudhon remarks, war is always the result of an economic strain
which cannot be remedied by less costly and less complicated means, such as
commerce or a commercial monopoly.
Benjamin Constant also truthfully observed: “Men have recourse to war only when they feel
that commerce is unable to secure for them what they seek to obtain by force.” Achile Loria, The
Economic Causes of War, John Leslie Garner, Trans., Charles H. Kerr & Company,
Chicago, 1918, p. 55.
So imagine yourself walking into a convenience store, holding money in one hand and a pistol in the other. Everyone would act that way all the time. Every time anyone would buy so much as a pack of gum, both they and the proprietor would have to decide whether money was going to change hands and, if so, how much, based on a mutual assessment of who would win a firefight.
Would that be a sane way to run one’s business – or the entire planet’s – if any alternative was available?
Now, to fully simulate our reality of diminishing petroleum reserves and growing weapon technologies, imagine that both parties had children freezing and starving to death back home, and, instead holding of a gun, everyone grasped the detonator to bandoliers of dynamite wrapped around their body, wired to detonate their own plus everyone else’s.
Would any sane witness stick around – this city or this planet – to see what happened? Could there be a less surreal alternative?
First off, let’s dispel the next pair of weapon myths―the most powerful, common and pernicious.
First weapon myth: World Peace will never happen until a community of saints has unanimously repented its prior sins. Nothing less than this unattainable caricature could define Peace to the satisfaction of these mythmakers. I wonder if the majority of people thought the same way about the end of cannibalism and slavery, before those were stamped out. Everyone would have to become a true saint first. Sure.
On the contrary, PeaceWorld will be messy, contentious, very ‘political,’ quite corrupt, potentially heartbreaking and subject to periodical failure, perhaps on a massive scale, perhaps enough to be lethal for humanity and its civilization. Human happiness and unhappiness would retain the same significance on PeaceWorld, as they do on WeaponWorld.
The only difference would be that organized murder would be made illegal, and that law would be grimly enforced. War would become less frequent, extensive and mass-produced; it would be peddled less easily as something honorable and glorious. In the absence of war, every other form of human conflict would expand to take its place. Get used to that.
The second weapon myth: that an advocate of Peace must aspire to sainthood or be a certifiable saint, first (depending on how the auditor wants to condemn him). “Are you human in your actions, weaknesses and failures? Are you yelling at me instead of seducing me into Peace, the way a real saint would? You may not speak of it. Do you claim sainthood by speaking of Peace? You are too ambitious, too smart-ass; you have a Messiah complex and are not fit for the task. In any case, I needn’t pay attention to you talk of Peace.”
Peace advocates are human beings who stink when they don’t wash; who breathe fresh air and exhale CO2 and sometimes bad breath; who experience needs, fear, hatred, greed and ambition like anyone else. There need be nothing saintly in the makeup of a peace advocate, nor is saintliness required for that kind of work. Might help, but would not be mandatory.
Elsewhere, I invoke the massed saints of PeaceWorld. Simply put, the first ones do not lead to the second, rather in the opposite order: we could become saints more easily after we had created PeaceWorld. On the other hand, mass sainthood is impossible (though required by every religion) on WeaponWorld. Weapon mythology transposes these requirements and results; the peace version simply sets them in their natural order of occurrence: PeaceWorld, first; sainthood thereafter.
Whoever spreads these weapon myths is just another weapon mentor trying to muddy the waters. Whoever holds to them does so to satisfy his warmonger prejudices and forbid peace forever. These two weapon myths are as valid as they are harmless.
Get used to that, too.
Regardless of your preference, you will be made to swallow war and war will be made to swallow you. Yet we buy into this other nonsense: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This quote, just another Latin contaminant in our constellation of political metaphors.
Vegetius, a 5th Century CE Roman, coined that phrase. A total of 150 copies of his De Re Militari, (“On Military Matters”) made it through the Dark Ages. This, despite a hecatomb of peace literature during the same period, (per Arther Ferrill’s article “Vegetius”, p. 487, in Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker, Eds., The Reader’s Companion to Military History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York, 1996).
Like other disasters, war serves no other purpose than its own. It just exudes more and more unforeseen and dire consequences. The only consistent output of warfare is deadlier and deadlier weapon technologies.
Wars are never short; warfare is perpetual. Some wars have been shortened by stagey statecraft: Desert Storm, Panama and Grenada, for example. This homicide interruptus just lessens their decisiveness. Long wars are trivially conclusive; short wars, even more indecisive.
Weapon mythology ennobles wars no nobler than latrine buckets on death row.
Somehow, war gets credit for breakthroughs in literacy, freedom, social harmony, equality and other social benefits that elites have to cough up, sooner or later—if only with the utmost reluctance. Even though they benefit the most from this exchange, in the long run. Somehow, wars constitute the only acceptable form of male bonding; they turn boys into men and render invisible the cripples, mental vegetables and cadavers resulting from it.
Haven’t we heard these weapon myths a thousand times? Memorized them hypnotically and recited them to each other for a hundred generations?
Instead, we should devote the Virtual Agora to peace mentality and saturate the collective superconscience with its myths. We should make these phenomena observable there, to anyone interested in observing them. We would no longer offer up in error all those sinister thoughts, writings, dramas and outcomes on the altar of weapon mentality. Then we could see how much this altered point of view could improve the common lot.
We should imitate the wisest of primal shamans. In their ancient wisdom, they consigned survivors of combat to elaborate rituals of social withdrawal and purification. No warrior could rejoin the peaceful community until he had completed these ceremonies. In the modern world, we ignore this subliminal venom. Unacknowledged, it curdles veterans’ psyches, turns them into walking dead: the last casualties of wars long forgotten.
“Latest figures show that 264 [British] veterans of the 1982
Falklands war have committed suicide since the conflict, compared with the 255
who died in active service.” http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030521165439.qscyf5x8.html
Meanwhile, Simon Gardner of Reuters (8-19-2004) writes that over
three hundred Argentinean veterans have killed themselves since the war—perhaps
denoting the therapeutic benefits of Latin passion over Anglo-Saxon emotional
reserve when it comes to post-traumatic stress; since there were a lot more
Argentinean veterans and since they suffered military defeat and its
psychological aftermath.
Victorious or defeated, combat veterans are heart-broken because they survived their beloved peers. If they find no permissible outlet for their grief, their adrenal-grenadier internal monologue runs something like this. “Since I had nothing better to do, I let the armed (Harm) Forces squander my golden youth in contempt, regimentation, brutality and terror. Myself, beloved companions and countless innocents were forced to run this gauntlet of defilement, disfigurement and death. Just by participating, we endorsed all this suffering. We survivors bear a fearsome bloodguilt. Those who refused to go are even guiltier in our eyes.”
Peace activists are the guiltiest of all, as far as they’re concerned. We reject the utility of war without experiencing it. As if we had to catch the plague in order to seek its cure? In so doing, we render intolerable each warrior’s burden of pain and shame. After all, shouldn’t we be grateful for the burden they shouldered? Is that not the least we could do, honor them and their pain?
No way. Warriors have been honored to death for far too long. There has been no improvement in sight for us or for them. It is time humanity resumed ancient rituals of warrior decontamination and psychic decompression, instead of glorifying those who have dealt intimately with abominations and failed to purify themselves. It is time we joined together, reluctant warriors and confused peaceniks alike, to resume the ways of peace.
What little good comes from war, a well-run peace could produce sooner and better. Those who suggest otherwise are running a con, consciously or otherwise. If they assert that war promotes creativity while peaceful societies stagnate, they’re living in a nightmare.
“We may be sure that wars will continue on the earth. War may be a biological necessity in the
development of the human race – God’s housecleaning, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox
calls it. War may be a great soul
stimulant meant to purge mankind of evils greater than itself, evils of
baseness and world degeneration. We know
there are blighted forests that must be swept clean by fire. Let us not scoff at such a theory until we
understand the immeasurable mysteries of life and death. We know that, through the ages, two terrific
and devastating racial impulses have made themselves felt among men and have
never been restrained, sex attraction and war.
Perhaps they were not meant to be restrained.
“Listen to John Ruskin, apostle of art and spirituality:
“‘All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on
war. No great art ever rose on earth but
among a nation of soldiers. There is no
great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. When I tell you that war is the foundation of
all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and
faculties of men. It was very strange
for me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an
undeniable fact. The common notion that
peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together, I found to be utterly
untenable. We talk of peace and
learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilization; together; that on her
lips the words were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and
death. I found in brief that all great
nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they
were nourished in war and wasted in peace; taught by war and deceived by peace;
trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war and
expired in peace.’” Cleveland Moffet, The
Conquest of America at http://www.knowledgerush.com/paginated_txt/etext05/7conq10/7conq10_s1_p10_pages.html .
[Author’s note: All
this would be perfectly true on WeaponWorld where war and preparation for war
corrupt and eradicate every trace of peace.
On PeaceWorld, where it flourished and war was equivalent to gagging
over a plate of shit, luxuriant peace would outperform war by thousands of
times.
As prior peaceful tribes must have managed to do, we could
find dynamic means to endure and neutralize the harmful effects of egotism,
idleness and opulence: mythical reasons to perpetuate mass killing which is
forbidden by God, while the other three are not—in case someone had forgotten.]
I recall one bellicose author who asserted how much more advanced, enlightened and brilliant international conflict had made the world. This is another pet weapon myth. Fearlessly (I must admit with some admiration), he visited Kosovo, Kigali and like military pestholes to fuel his otherwise insightful journalism. He collected important friends and powerful contacts at each stop. He could have chosen any one of these sites in which to settle. Instead, he is raising his kids in some quiet backwater of Western Massachusetts. Presumably, what he really meant to say was that war is creative and enlightening―for other peoples’ kids.
Weapon managers view real creativity and serious Learning with tremendous suspicion. At best, such attributes are effeminate and debilitating liabilities; at worst, treasonous assaults on long-cherished traditions and idiot protocols.
As for the stagnancy of peace, well: “95% of everything is crap,” as a wise guy once put it, and 95% of the people are mindless drones doomed by current ‘education’ to intellectual inertia and the rote repetition of banal futility. Meanwhile, 5% or less of the population does and says anything of consequence, good or bad.
Learners alone, in a truly peaceful setting, could reverse these ridiculous percentiles through serious applications of Learning.
The list of weapon myths is endless and we recite them endlessly to each other. No real peace will emerge until we halt this ceaseless invocation—until we challenge, recognize and defy every weapon myth on the spot.
Two more weapon myths allow people to act like ostriches, their heads stuck in the sand to hide from lethal hazards.
The first is the epithet ‘paranoid’. These days, commentators use the adjective paranoid to describe anyone who discusses controversial and potentially dangerous topics without paying due reverence to the rotten status quo. ‘Paranoid’ is their shorthand for: “I was too distracted and indifferent to study seriously what he had to say. His content isn’t worth looking into; trust my spineless prejudice.”
The second is ‘conspiracy theory.’ People keep lecturing me that a complex conspiracy involving more than a handful of individuals is virtually impossible, especially if they hail from various backgrounds and hold diverse priorities.
Bullshit.
The American U-2 program of spy planes, that surveilled Russia and China at very high altitude, went on for a half-decade, unreported by the Press and strictly denied by everyone from the President on down. This program employed hundreds of industrial contractors, thousands of military personnel from line cooks to base commanders; hundreds of government bureaucrats and intelligence technicians; and many more foreign officials whose cooperation was required to keep these planes based overseas and flying through foreign air space. Yet it “didn’t exist” until the Soviets literally shot one out of the sky and staged a show trial of the pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
Such “impossible” conspiracies are routine in the military-congressional-media complex. So why not others, more devious and criminal? Especially those that leave behind a trail of dead and/or terrorized witnesses?
In America, there is only one kind of conspiracy, the failed kind. Bumbling amateurs commit a massive crime in broad daylight. They leave a giant paper trail no rookie journalist could miss. They are too softhearted to kill and terrorize many witnesses who will give the whole story away without worrying about their family’s safety. That is the only definition of a conspiracy accepted by popular American culture.
Unfortunately, there is another sort: one in which cunning, powerful and merciless malefactors are skilled at perpetrating their own crimes and exposing those of their enemies. They and their mentors have practiced for centuries; they are experts. They can call on enormous institutional memory of criminal and police procedure, hire the best professionals to do their dirty work. Their dirty laundry is stamped Top Secret and protected by the full force of the law. They are so rich and influential, they control the mass media. They have no conscience: killing witnesses is a minor inconvenience. They have enough patience to clean up after themselves, and many eager subordinates to take the fall if necessary.
Classical Greeks, at the height of their power, used to brand this practice as oriental, effeminate and degenerate despotism. They spat on it and crushed it almost effortlessly. A few thousand of their free citizens could route the largest horde these gangsters could bully into the front line—no matter if it were ten times more numerous. They didn’t surrender to the Roman Empire until they had become dominated by like-minded gangsters at home.
Note this almost automatic degeneracy over time, regardless of chronology, creed or geography. These gangsters rot out their own armies, by definition. Their transparent gangsterism (Submit to our obvious wrongdoing or else!) is all that our vibrant freedoms have degenerated into. We should be ashamed of our limp-wristed tolerance of this corruption.
Once the crime has been committed, there is no paper trail. There are no surviving witnesses except those terrified into silence. There is an overwhelming accrual of circumstantial evidence, obvious lies and loose ends no one can explain, and a pile of dead bodies instead of key witnesses, but no evidence that would stand up in court. Anyone who uncovers that evidence, after a lifetime’s investigation, gets quietly eliminated. Blackmail and extortion endure for decades, even the threat of civil war if word gets out. Archives are sealed and incriminating evidence is confiscated and ‘lost’ by the bushel load. Most official investigators are supervised by these conspirators and their allies. They find nothing wrong, seemingly through unbelievable incompetence, which earns them their next promotion.
In the USA, this is never a conspiracy. A successful conspiracy is not a conspiracy; it is official policy, perfectly legitimate. Anyone who says otherwise can be branded a conspiracy theorist and dismissed without a hearing. What a reassuring and effortless way to mollycoddle powerful, well-connected and influential criminals. How convenient for them. What moral cowards everyone else turned out to be, in their pay and at their mercy!
As for the conspirators, success begets success; they are tempted to outdo themselves the next time around, and do so gleefully. Criminal conspiracy is their ace in the hole, their ultimate backup argument. It is perfectly legitimate, protected by popular convention, official sanction and media repression. Nothing stops them.
We live in an age when no one well-connected is personally responsible for anything and every wrongdoing is someone else’s fault. Weak individuals get crushed, whether they are guilty or not; and powerful ones are free to behave badly, in perfect anonymity with perfect impunity.
What a perpetual train wreck on instant replay; what pure Zola! Except Zola himself would be branded a conspiracy theorist and strictly forbidden to accuse anyone of anything. [Note: Emile Zola wrote a book called I Accuse that blew wide open an infamous French scandal, the Dreyfus Affair].
I would rather be branded a paranoid conspiracy theorist and left sans dime or audience, than pocket the paychecks of twenty slimeball turncoats well-paid and much-admired to protect gangland conspirators.
A strong case can be made, that the ultimate achievement of hierarchical politicians may be to induce mourning and suffering among their enemies and to force their own people to endure additional misery. After all, the dead don’t vote or need submit to law and order. Only poor, grieving survivors must choose between surrender and continued resistance under unimaginable stress. Armies don’t collapse until their suffering has reached intolerable levels of grief and agony. Casualty counts are the only valid quantifiers of the misery that armies must generate and their victims, endure.
It is fortunate for us that our DNA took millions of years, prior to recorded history, to perfect itself in the form of intimately peaceful pack scavengers. Any deviation from the purest of ethics, any cumulative mayhem, unfruitful criminality or misallocation of scarce resources would have destroyed violence-contaminated packs. Operating on a razor-thin margin of survival, they had no leeway to drift away from moral excellence.
It may seem that we are sealed in an armored carapace of thousand-year military history. But this is just a skim, rancid icing on a much deeper and sweeter cake of behavioral excellence. Up to us to shave off the bad part and enjoy the remainder.
The freedom we seek is not based on some fantasy utopia (as weapon mentors keep insisting). It is based on the perfect freedoms our ancestors carried around in their hearts, guts and brains for hundreds of thousands of years. Paleolithic hunter-gatherer freedom is the political context we crave, regardless of the fear weapon mentors have acid-etched with adrenalin onto our mind.
The spread of peace would not affect Learners alone in a vacuum. When we confront an aggressor nowadays – from lone thug to military-industrial complex – we expect the Other to share our fears and weapon myths. They dictate that we hesitate to extend an overture of peace to him and that he reject our attempts to do so, unless one of us is down for the count. Weapon mythology whispers the same prejudices into everyone’s ear. According to its prejudices, every attempt at peacemaking is a token of weakness and betrayal that should ignite universal suspicion, hostility and aggression.
If peace mentality prevailed in our constellation of political metaphors, we could dissipate this aggression (bilateral or unilateral) with common gestures and mutually acceptable formulas of reconciliation. These would never be considered tokens of weakness, but reliable demonstrations of wisdom, trustworthiness and safe power. Any child could defuse a murderous gun battle in an instant― the same way a beta pack scavenger shuts down an alpha-dominant’s lethal punishment by exposing its defenseless underbelly.
This capacity for spontaneous peacemaking is hard-wired into every healthy adult. We have merely forgotten it temporarily, deprogrammed it from our minds and driven ourselves out of our mind in the process.
Once Learners respond to the worldwide rally call, we will form an inarguable majority: an overwhelming one that will neutralize, therapeutically, tiny minorities too badly traumatized to control their aggression.
I was inspired to cry the alarm like this when I read Jean Bacon’s breakthrough book, The Greater Glory, Prism Press, California, 1986.
Thereafter, we will study and institutionalize many hidden talents and capabilities. We may unleash enormous psychic energies that were held in check up ‘til now. We have repressed these talents out of a rightful sense of self-preservation. After all, if we had loosed those energies prematurely on WeaponWorld, they would have annihilated us. We are limited, today, to hurling dead matter and powdered manure at each other. Like our ape ancestors, we throw shit at each other. Despite this fecal constraint, we have achieved global levels of devastation and are on the verge of a mass extinction event of our own making.
It is only on PeaceWorld that we could withdraw from that cliff edge and obtain orders of magnitude more energy in secure abundance, without feeling obsessively compelled to blow everything away with it.
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PEACE MENTALITY: Peace mythology Peace tech > Weapon technology |
WEAPON MENTALITY: Weapon tech > Peace technology |
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ABUNDANCE And prosperity for all. |
Decadence. |
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ABUNDANCE: UNIVERSAL ABUNDANCE or universal poverty. |
Little wealth and much poverty simultaneously. |
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ACTION: Given half a chance, people will act wisely and well. |
Given half a chance, people will do ill. |
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ADMIRATION |
Respect. |
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ANARCHY equals freedom |
Anarchy equals chaos. |
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AVARICE |
Self-promotion. |
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BLESSING |
Curse. |
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BROTHERHOOD: We are all brothers and sisters in God’s eyes. |
I am not my brother’s keeper. |
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BUILD bridges; knock down (Berlin) walls |
Blow up bridges (Mitrovica); build walls |
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BUSINESS through cooperatives and utilities. |
Business by corporations. |
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CAUSE & EFFECT: Fear grows violence and untruth. |
Lust causes excess, which provokes Wrath. |
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CHILDREN are small adults in terms of rights and special in terms of needs. |
Spare the rod and spoil the child. Children are basically cheap labor. |
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COMMON SENSE |
Dogma. |
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COMMONS Tribal sharing and reverent conservation |
Exhaustive exploitation by the few |
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COMPASSION |
Selfishness. |
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CONSENSUS |
Hierarchy. |
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CONTINUITY Through personal responsibility. |
Continuity through institutions. |
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COOPERATION |
Competition. |
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CORRECTION |
Punishment. |
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CREATE |
Protect. |
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CRIME PREVENTION: jobs and good social services prevent crime. |
The best crime prevention is swift and sure punishment. |
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DEMOCRACY: Direct democracy is best. |
Representative democracy works best. |
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DEMOCRACY: For every person, the same number of votes. |
One million dollars, one vote. |
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DEVOTION |
Fear. |
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DISTRIBUTION: From each according to his talents, to each according to his needs. |
Maximum profit for the few at the risk and expense of the many. |
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DO GOOD |
Do gooder. |
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ECOLOGY is paramount to survival. |
Ecology is a fabrication. |
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EMPATHY |
Self-pity. |
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ENLIGHTENMENT |
Realism. |
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ENLIGHTENMENT: Self Discovery |
Proper indoctrination. |
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EVOLUTION by the effects of outside factors |
By mutual struggle and survival of the fittest. |
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FREE WILL |
Conditioning. |
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FREEDOM is inherent. Everyone is always free. |
Freedom is earned. Heroes are free and cowards are slaves. |
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FUN: pure enjoyment & pleasure. Timelessness and annihilation of ego. Learning must be a fun game to be most effective. |
Fun: empty diversion, ridicule (to make fun of someone) & competition. Fun, games and serious learning are absolutely incompatible. |
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FUTURE: the future holds promise. |
The future is at best uncertain. |
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GAMES: the ultimate learning tool. |
Games: “You’re not serious, right?” |
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GOOD & EVIL |
Ours and theirs Required and forbidden Usual and unusual (We have no idea) |
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GOOD & EVIL: Love conquers Fear; Fear leads to violence and untruth. |
Wisdom conquers Ignorance in the Chosen alone. Ignorance induces Lust, which leads to Excess and Wrath. |
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GOODNESS |
Morality |
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GOVERNMENT: Competent government is best. |
Slow, stupid government is best. Efficient government promotes tyranny. |
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GOVERNMENT at the planetary level, ADMINISTRATIONS at grass roots levels. |
Governments at Nation and State levels in military competition for the most limited number of privileged positions. |
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GOVERNMENT redistributes wealth. |
Government reconcentrates wealth at the top. |
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GOVERNMENT: Good government is fair. |
By definition, government is inefficient and amoral. |
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GRACE through Charity. |
Ritual. |
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GUILT:
inner-directed, leads to humility, compassion for victims and identification
with them, regret, repentance and a desire to make amends. “What I did was
wrong.” |
SHAME: focuses on
humiliation; leads to self-pity, denial and evasion; shifts the blame onto
the victim or someone else; multiplies rage and follow-up malfeasance. “I am a horrible
person.” |
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HAPPINESS for everyone. |
The Chosen Few have the absolute right to pursue happiness. |
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HELL does not exist Except for this one here of our own making. |
All but the Chosen Few are damned to hell. |
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HOPE |
Fear. |
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HOW can we improve the community? |
What’s in it for me and mine? |
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IDEALISTS |
Bleeding hearts |
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IDEALS |
Formulas and clichés. |
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IDEALS |
Limitations and apprehensions. |
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IGNORANCE corrupts. |
Power corrupts. |
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IMAGINATION, wonder and dreams |
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INCLUSION |
Exclusiveness. |
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INFORMATION: Broadcast it. |
Hoard information, broadcast dis/misinformation. |
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INSPIRATION |
Fraud. |
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JURY DUTY is central to public spirit. |
Jury duty is a trivial formality best left to people too stupid to avoid it. |
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JURY DUTY: Randomly selected juries. Total jury empowerment. Jury nullification. |
Juries are too irresponsible to come up with valid decisions unless they are carefully sorted by law school graduates and then thoroughly regulated by judges. Actually, they should be eliminated and replaced by trained and certified specialists at law. |
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JUSTICE |
Revenge. |
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JUSTICE is complex and unique to each case. |
An eye for an eye is pure justice. |
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JUSTICE versus tyranny |
Law and order versus chaos |
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LAOCRACY |
National Socialism (Nazi) National Communism (Stalin, Mao) National Capitalism (corporate) In short, Sociopathocracy |
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LAOCRACY The rule of an Information Commonwealth. |
Fear the mob. Democracy insulates us from the mob and allays its threat. |
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LEADERSHIP: by the very best tribal statespeople |
By closet sociopaths and their slaves |
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LEADERSHIP is earned. |
Rank hath its privileges. |
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LEADERSHIP: Society creates the leadership it deserves by pressuring and molding its leaders, in the same way a beehive produces queen bees as necessary. |
The King is dead, long live the King. Superior leaders ‘pull’ the rest of society forward. |
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LEARNING is understanding how to think. |
Teaching The Chosen to retain the best values from the past. |
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LIBERAL |
Conservative |
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LOYALTY: One world. Global Confederacy. |
My country, right or wrong. Patriotic nationalism. |
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MAGIC, miracle |
Witchcraft, Satanism. |
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MISERY makes sin. |
Sin produces well-deserved misery. |
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MORALITY equals the Golden Rule. |
Possession is 9/10ths of the law. |
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MORALITY: Everything in moderation, almost nothing in excess. |
Good and evil acts are clearly defined and judged by God. |
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MORALITY: Tit for tat plus: First do good, then do what was last done to you, with many exceptions favoring good. |
Genetic morality: Do good to self and relatives. Do ill to others. Cheat whenever possible. From Roy F. Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. |
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MORALITY: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to evil.” – St. Luke 6-35, the Bible. |
Tit for Tat at all costs, without regard for unforeseen consequences. |
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MORALITY: In moderation, wine, women and song. |
Degeneracy. |
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MOTIVATION: Righteousness |
Fear. |
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NATURE: preserve it to ensure survival. |
Nature is capital for cash profit. Use it or lose it to someone more businesslike. |
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NEO-CORTEX (problem solving) |
Limbic system (threat assessment) |
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NEW JERUSALEM |
Utopia (A place that cannot be). |
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NURTURE |
Nature red in tooth and claw. |
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PAST: the past was barbarous. |
The past held a Golden Age. |
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PEACE is necessary for human survival |
Peace is impossible. |
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PEACE is the ultimate destination of civilization. |
War is the ultimate summons of civilization. |
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People are innately good. |
Due to Original Sin, man is innately evil. |
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PEOPLE have equal, inalienable rights. |
Some people (especially my people) are naturally superior. Most of the remainder are inferior. Some people, (my people) are meant to lead, while the rest are meant to serve. |
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PEOPLE: The people rule. |
The people are children. |
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PERSUASION |
Force. |
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POLITICIANS: We should have no politicians, but recruit trained mediators and motivated public facilitators, the way we recruit jury members. |
The best politicians are the most corrupt frauds; they are the most predictable and malleable. |
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POLITICS and morality are inseparable. |
Politics is amoral, morality is apolitical. |
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POLITICS: Information politics |
Politics of ignorance, misinformation and disinformation |
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POLITICS: Improvement through Satyagraha. |
All politics are corrupt & fraudulent. |
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PRESENT: the present is scandalous. |
The present keeps getting worse. |
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PROGRESS through massive, collective improvement. |
If any, only by preserving the best elements of the past. |
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PROGRESSIVE |
Reactionary. |
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PROMOTION by merit. |
Promotion by birth. |
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RACE is a cosmetic artifact. |
Race is the ultimate mark of superiority/inferiority. |
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RACES are interchangeable. |
Superior races stay pure. Inferior races become mongrelized. |
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REACTIONARIES |
Leadership. |
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REALITY: Meditation and dreams can be just as powerful as ‘reality’. |
Hard work in real time is everything. |
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REGULATION for the potentially disruptive. |
Laissez-faire for the powerful. |
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RELIGION: Celebration |
Sacrifice the Other. |
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RELIGION: Political morality. |
Self-perfection and personal salvation. |
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RELIGION: Sacred Awe and Grace. |
Religion: Ceremony and Hierarchy. |
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RELIGION: self-sacrifice. |
Sacrifice the Other. |
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RELIGIOUS TEXTS offer parables and examples. |
Contain every historic and societal truth we need. |
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RIGHTEOUSNESS and, through it, power. |
Might makes right. |
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RIGHTS and responsibilities. |
Privileges and penalties. |
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RULE by plurality. |
Rule by a self-defined elite. |
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RULE from the bottom up. |
Rule from the top down. |
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SALVATION through good works. |
Salvation through personal purity and ritual cleansing. |
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SALVATION by reincarnating one’s soul into Jesus’ Life, after death. |
Salvation by obeying perfectly our incoherent religious instruction on this Earth (and no one else’s). |
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SELFISHNESS is harmful unless well regulated and self-aware. |
Regulated only by the “unseen hand”: the best regulator. |
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Sex: most sex is good. |
Sex is wrong except to multiply. |
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SOCIAL ORDER through self-discipline and personal responsibility. |
Through clearly defined hierarchies and the application of force. |
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STEWARDSHIP: We are caretakers of a world we do not own. |
What’s mine is mine. Property rights produce civilization. |
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SUPERNATURE |
Superstition. |
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TOTALITARIAN |
Realist. |
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TRIAL AND ERROR |
Precedent. |
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WAR is evil, peace is good. |
Praise the Lord And pass the ammunition. |
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WAR: Life would be better without war. |
Life would be stagnant/decadent/boring without war. |
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WAR: “War is hell.” W.T. Sherman. |
R.E. Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible— we would grow too fond of it.” |
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WEALTH comes in two forms: earned and unearned. |
Wealth is good. |
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WEALTH: Personal wealth is an accident. |
Personal wealth is deserved. |
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WEALTH: Everyone owns everything as a birthright. |
(Almost) everyone but me should own less than I. |
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WHAT can I do to improve the World? |
What can I get away with? |
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WORK: Do what you’re best at. Contribute to abundance. |
Do what I tell you to do. Work or starve. |
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Shadism |
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George Orwell’s masterwork, 1984, describes a hyper-Churchillian nation-state so powerful that it could
adopt pure peace technology. Instead, it
dedicates itself to endless global warfare.
More or less at random, it rejoins or fights with its continental
equivalents overseas. In this way, it
overtaxes the discipline and resources of its misinformed proletariat.
Post-Orwellian weapon mentors have convinced us that the best way to
safeguard human rights is to keep the government as clumsy as possible. According to them, the more efficient a
government becomes, the worse it would crush justice, peace and liberty.
This is the 1984 Syndrome, enshrined in weapon mythology.
Actually, this myth promotes crypto-fascism (fascism that won’t
acknowledge itself). Narrow-minded
governments get themselves into jams.
Stupidly, they will try to extract themselves by piling terror on
top of hardship.
We could avoid this unhappy outcome by developing super-efficient local
Administrations over-watched by the best World Government we could devise.
In our weapon religions, God reigns peremptorily from his storm cloud
on high, without debate except among His select hierarchs. Similarly, in pyramidal weapon hierarchies,
commands descend without appeal from ranking info elites to the bottomed-out
proletariat.
In a weapon state, responsibility and intellectual creativity are rare privileges reserved for a trusted few. Weapon hierarchs find aid, comfort and advancement in arbitrary promotion criteria, departmental clannishness and pecking orders. Popular review of controversial topics is forbidden. Weapon managers rely on by-the-book solutions—no matter how lame those solutions may be. Regardless of real-time rights and wrongs, problems are dealt with by fiat, based on irrelevant traditions and misapplications of past precedent.
These weapon hierarchies come with built-in redundancy of personnel. They make life-and-death decisions (even bad ones) without debate, despite the high-stress, high-mortality environment and information chaos of combat.
For example, in Queen Victoria’s day, noble families openly purchased
officer commissions. The more money they
could tender, the more prestigious the unit their candidate could sign up for,
regardless of his merit. Thanks for this
reminder, Paul Lackman.
Nowadays, not only are military entrance positions open for sale to the
richest families, but so is the Presidency of the United States and every
position of responsibility below it.
Good luck with that kind of weapon leadership, absolutely
incompetent at peace.
Weapon hierarchies promote authoriphiles who submit to superiors
and tyrannize inferiors; they marginalize authoriphobes who challenge
management prerogatives and empower their subordinates. Competence and job skills are at best
secondary considerations. No criminal
genius passes unrewarded through a weapon civilization.
Another sad tendency trips up the most competent weapon managers. Sooner or later, their weapon policies back
them into intolerable policy corners.
Attempting to turn around the worst of their unintended
consequences, they treat each evil symptomatically, as if in a vacuum. “Today,
let’s discuss child abuse; tomorrow, local hunger. Next day, we’ll tackle traffic congestion;
and next fiscal year, perhaps, corruption.” Each lunge at progress gets swamped in social
contradictions that swarm around it.
Leadership grows from respect.
Respect can be founded on admiration or on fear. Terror is the final arbiter in weapon
hierarchies where indifferent leaders flourish through counterfeit
competition adjudicated from above, with little concern for the needs of the
led. Weapon leaders boast of rewards acquired at the expense of the
led. They use riches to insulate
themselves and their dependents from the worst consequences of their
despotism. This misrule forces weapon
managers to rely on tyranny, unwholesome materialism, snowballing incoherence
and hypocrisy as substitutes for valid ethics.
When good ethics become less essential
to run things, greed grows more brazen.
Hierarchical leaders shatter bonds that should bind them to the led:
social, emotional, economic and informational bonds. Each broken link subtracts from their ability
(and willingness) to lead honestly and effectively.
“In proportion as the chiefs become detached
from the mass, they show themselves more and more inclined, when gaps in their
own ranks have to be filled, to effect this, not by way of popular election,
but by cooptation, and also to increase their own effectives wherever possible,
by creating new posts upon their own initiative. There arises in leaders a tendency to isolate
themselves, to form a sort of cartel, and to surround themselves, as it were,
with a wall, within which they will admit only those who are of their own way
of thinking. Instead of allowing their
successors to be appointed by the choice of the rank and file, the leaders do
all in their power to choose these successors themselves, and to fill up gaps
in their own ranks directly or indirectly by the exercise of their own volition.” Robert Michels, “Political Parties, 1911”, taken from Princeton Readings in Political Thought, p. 526
Primal societies tended to compartmentalize their peace and warfare decision-makers. They delegated two leaders and two or more separate councils – blessed with different talents and sensibilities – to handle these clashing responsibilities. Most often, a complex, clannish and shifting network of womenfolk, revered elders and shamans controlled the peaceful aspects of society. Young hotheads and heroic veterans only did so during rare days of battle.
Peace leaders relied on open debate, consensus, voluntarism and
cooperation. Leaders and led shared
rewards, values and available information freely. In short, they gossiped shamelessly. Qualified leaders recruited, challenged and
replaced one another in a steady stream.
If they overvalued the perks
they had acquired at the expense of the led, they lost the respect upon which
their authority was based, and sacrificed any claim to that authority. Their power base deflated like a worn-out
balloon.
No such selection process remains in weapons hierarchies where blatant
incompetents and sleazebags rule without hindrance—indeed, come to
dominate society through the cumulative mentoring and replacement of like-minded malefactors.
Communications are reduced to pompous speeches, massive campaign
contributions, empty promises and capricious demands.
Peace hierarchies would promote playful creativity under token time constraints in a tranquil setting. Ideally suited to generate real, cooperative wealth under stable conditions, they are unsuited to the time-slaved rigors of warfare—much less the cutthroat, zero-sum competition of weapon management between its inevitable wars.
Popular aspirations must take precedence over hierarchic perks, and
leadership must find its own reward in its noble conduct, self-sacrifice and
public honor.
If the led are not accustomed to respect these traits by long
tradition, if they have been pistol-whipped into blind obedience to terror and
arbitrary decision-making, then peace mentality cannot endure in that weapon
milieu without collapsing into chaos.
Everyone must be carefully retrained in peace.
A society may be materially poor, yet thrive under peace
leadership. Its neighbor may be aswim in
material goods, yet pauperize and lobotomize itself at the command of its corrupt
weapon managers.
The best alternative would be a longstanding peace culture based on
tradition, whose leadership benefited from unlimited abundance shared
equally. The worst is our alternative:
interchangeable weapon managers hoarding wealth and power at the expense of a
crushingly large but politically crushed majority, while wielding maximum
firepower and not much else except the promise of future misery.
You choose.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique in 1762 (On the Social Contract or Principles of Political Rights). There followed the French Revolution and a near-perpetual state of World War since.
Christianity took two thousand years to succeed, and failed miserably. Its smug hierarchs seized Christ’s perfect message (perfection would mean 100% adoption by humanity) and twisted it so much that only one out of six people on Earth would have anything to do with it. According to those hierarchs, their doctrine and transmission methods are perfect; at fault are the five sixths of humanity that turned away from Christianity in disgust. It seems evident to these hierarchs that non-believers deserve to die and be damned. How much more perfectly un-Christlike could one get, than the fathead conceit of that hierarchy?
Instead of two thousand years, Rousseau’s social contract took two hundred to establish itself and suffered equivalent failure. The advocates of the French Revolution and the Terror worshipped Rousseau and his social contract. If anyone could have made it work the way he intended, they would have. Every liberal, humanist and democrat has paid due reverence to it since, all for naught.
It seems that Rousseau left out something vital, some key element of his social contract without which it was worthless except as a minor argument against the National Capitalism of Hobbes that prevails in its place. That missing element was what common law calls a consideration: "some right, interest, profit or benefit accruing to the one party; or some forbearance, detriment, loss or responsibility given, suffered or undertaken by the other." It is difficult to contemplate a contract in which one party would give something away from pure affection or fear, and the other would be expected to do nothing in return. Rousseau himself dismissed this scenario.
“Whether from one man to another or from one to a people,
this talk will always be just as insane:
I make a pact with you entirely in your care and entirely to my benefit;
to which I will stick as long as I please and to which you will stick as long
as I please.” Book I, Chapter 4.
[Note: This pact
would be just as crazy between nations, even if enforced by victory in
war. It would require an armed guard
over every locality tempted to resist it.
It would be unenforceable even then, as the U.S. is discovering in Iraq and
as every prior colonial empire discovered most painfully and dishonorably.]
The primary purpose of the social contract is to replace pity: the common virtue of men in a state of nature, which cancels the ill effects of natural inequalities between them. Men in society substitute pity with “laws, customs and virtue,” and have obviously failed at that substitution.
The social contract’s primary intent appears to shift from “liberty” (its supreme goal in Book I, Chapter 6), to “the greatest good for all” (the end purpose of all legislation per line one of Book II, Chapter 11). These intentions are poorly defined and essentially circular. The social contract will be incontestable because it will be incontestably worthwhile because everyone will agree this is incontestably so. How tidily circular and convenient! There are no loose ends because the uroboros serpent swallowed its tail.
Essentially, Mr. Rousseau never discovered the hook on which to hang his hat. That is why he never undertook to describe the foreign relations component of his social contract. Not because he couldn’t find the time (his excuse), but because the constrained communications of his 18th century WeaponWorld made its transformation into PeaceWorld impossible. Unlike our communications today, which make global peace entirely practicable, despite our archaic and sacrosanct bias to the contrary.
To be valid, a social contract must have some real, tangible consideration its signatories find worthwhile to establish and useful to maintain through personal and collective sacrifice. Something they could see, feel and hear every day of their lives, worth living to uphold and dying to protect; something a vast majority would support through thick and thin. It would be so obvious that its unmistakable presence would guarantee that the social contract were being honestly fulfilled; so obvious that its slightest absence would negate the contract automatically.
That something, that consideration everyone would recognize right away, is PeaceWorld. PeaceWorld would be obvious and unmistakable. Its failure to replace WeaponWorld, or its subsequent decay back into WeaponWorld, or its disappearance in a distant land, all these events would be equally obvious and annul the social contract. This would mobilize everyone to reestablish PeaceWorld, the way the loss of an ancient battle emblem or modern radio contact would lead to their fevered reestablishment during a hot firefight. The social contract could not be reasserted until it had been allowed to appear once again, like raising a sunken ship.
But let’s see what Rousseau had to say.
[Author’s note: On
PeaceWorld, the following passage would apply to nations as well as individuals
(men and, of course, women). There would
be far fewer personal degradations than those WeaponWorld imposes on us in
industrial quantities.]
“This shift from a state of nature to the civil state
induces a quite remarkable transformation in people, by substituting instinct
with justice in their conduct and endowing their actions with the integrity
they lacked. It is only once the voice
of duty overrides physical impulse and entitlement to cravings, that Man, who up ‘til then had seen only to
himself, finds that he is compelled to act upon new principles and consult reason
before harkening to inclination. Even
if, in this state, he deprives himself of several advantages he has inherited
from nature, he recovers such great ones, his faculties are exercised and
strengthened, his ideas develop, his feelings are ennobled, his entire soul
reaches such heights that if the misdeeds of this new condition did not often
degrade him below that from which he had just escaped, he would ceaselessly
bless the lucky moment that tore him from it forever and molded a sentient
being and a man from a stupid, clueless animal.” Book I, Chapter 6.
“The first and foremost outcome of the principles
established above, is that the general will alone may direct the power of the
state in accordance with the end goal of its inception, which is the common
good. Whereas the conflict of special
interests made the creation of society necessary, the concord of these same
special interests made society possible.
That which these special interests hold in common forms the social bond;
and if there were no common point upon which all interests agree, no society
could exist. Thus it is only by this
common interest that society should be governed.” Book II, Chapter 1.
No-one found the common interest which special interests could share unanimously. National interests were always in contention, and universal agreement could never be established, even by Rousseau’s genius.
PeaceWorld is the only principle that could satisfy the strategic interests of every nation. It is the common interest we always lacked, that everyone could adopt in total security and mutual benefit. Within it, every valid interest would be satisfied, and the common interest, best secured. At that point and only then, the social contract could snap into place everywhere automatically. We could then honor it without exception, everyone of sane mind.
Please consider the following quote as if we had exhausted our petroleum reserves. Indeed, on a global scale, demand has already outstripped supply. The world economy is beginning to splinter under this sad burden, completely within a few years and perhaps catastrophically. This is happening now, not once you’ll be too old to care or once everyone is ‘perfectly ready.’ This is an inescapable fact: we do not have a second left to waste fooling ourselves and fooling around.
[Author’s note: In
our case, replace the term ‘State’ with ‘the entire world,’ and ‘the
individual’ with ‘nations and lesser aggregates, including individuals.’ Chaosism does not care what level it surges from;
peace can only spring from the highest level and all the lower ones acting in
concert.]
“But when the social
bond begins to let go and the State to weaken, when private interests begin to
make themselves felt and minor associations influence the greater one, the
common interest decays and finds antagonists, unanimity no longer rules the
voice vote, the common will ceases to be everyone’s, contradictions and debates
arise and the best counsel cannot be ratified without dispute.
“Lastly, when State, on the verge of ruin, no longer
subsists other than in vain and delusional forms, such that the social bond is
broken in every court and the most vile interest brazenly assumes the sacred
title of public good; at that point, the general will goes silent. Everyone, prompted by secret motives, thinks
no more like a citizen than if the State had never existed; and iniquitous
decrees are falsely passed in the guise of laws whose only goal is special
interest.
“Does it follow from this, that the general will is annihilated
or corrupted? No, it remains steadfast,
pure and constant; but it is enslaved to others that overwhelm it. Each person, drawing his gain from the common
good, sees clearly that he cannot split completely from it; but his share of
the public wrong seems like nothing when set against the exclusive benefits he
intends to claim. Aside from this
private advantage, he wishes the common good for himself, just like anyone
else. Even when he sells his ballot for
cash, he doesn’t snuff out the general will that smolders within him; he just
dodges it. The error he commits is in
changing the premise of the question and answering something else than what was
asked. Thus, instead of declaring with
his vote: ‘This proposal is beneficial for the State,’ he utters: ‘It is
beneficial for this person or that party, that such-and-such proposal be
ratified.’ Thus the rule of public order
in assemblies is not so much that the general will be maintained, but that it
always be consulted and that it always reply.” Book IV, Chapter 1
PeaceWorld is no longer an ideological exercise to be mulled over without end – given a reassuring and cozy status quo that will endure forever – whether or not world peace takes root. We must act now, while we still have the resources to make World Peace happen now.
If we were truly enlightened, we would have done so during the 1950’s when abundant resources could have cushioned the errors committed during the transition from weapons to peace. But we are mere killer primates, and must humbly beg Loving God to forgive us and compensate for our unforgivable stupidity.
In any case, if we wait for non-renewable resources to disappear before we act, we will have to endure inconceivable sacrifices with no corresponding celebration. The unavoidable consolidation of WeaponWorld will become a question of firepower, wreckage and casualties instead of PeaceWorld’s cooperation, creativity and peaceful intent. No good will come of it, only trouble.
‘Trouble.’ That is such an easy term to read and dismiss. Read fear, casualties and anguish beyond those humanity endured in the past. Let us beware, see reason and repent. There is so much work to be done, in so little time!
“The opinions of a people are born from its constitution. Even though the law does not regulate mores,
legislation gives birth to them. When
legislation weakens, values decay. But
at that point, the rule of censors won’t achieve what the force of the law has
failed to accomplish.
“It follows from this, then, that censure may be useful to
safeguard mores, but never to restore them.
Establish censors while the laws are still in force. Once they lose that, all is despair; nothing
legitimate has any power once the laws have none left.” Book IV, Chapter 7
“…To make the worker’s share in production the sole basis
for his claim to a livelihood – as was done even by Marx in the labor theory of
value he took over from Adam Smith – is, as power-production approaches
perfection, to cut the ground from under his feet. In actuality, the claim to a livelihood rests
upon the fact that, like the child in a family, one is a member of a community:
the energy, the technical knowledge, the social heritage of a community belong
equally to every member of it, since in the large the individual contributions
and differences are completely insignificant.
“[The classic name for such a universal system
of distributing the essential means of life – as described by Plato and More,
long before Owen and Marx – is communism, and I have retained it here. But let me emphasize that this communism is
necessarily post-Marxian, for the facts and values upon which it is based are
no longer the paleotechnic ones upon which Marx founded his policies and
programs. Hence communism, as used here,
does not imply the particular nineteenth century ideology, the messianic
absolutism, and the narrowly militarist tactics to which the official communist
parties usually cling, nor does it imply a slavish imitation of the political
methods and social institutions of Soviet Russia, however admirable soviet
courage and discipline may be]. [The italics and brackets above
are his.]
“Differentiation and preference and special incentive
should be taken into account in production and consumption only after the
security and continuity of life itself is assured. Here and there we have established the
beginnings of a basic communism in the provision of water and education and
books. There is no rational reason for
stopping short at any point this side of a normal standard of consumption. Such a basis has no relation to individual
capacities and virtues: a family of six requires roughly three times as much
goods as a family of two, although there may be but one wage earner in the
first group and two in the second. We
give at least a minimum of food and shelter and medical attention to criminals
who have presumably behaved against the interests of society: why then should
we deny it to the lazy and the stubborn?
To assume that the great mass of mankind would belong to the latter
category is to forget the positive pleasures of a fuller and richer life.” Lewis Mumford, Technics and
Civilization,
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1934, pp. 403-404.
I don’t know if Karl Marx had a sense of humor. What little I have read of his writings show none. Only a nation with a hearty sense of humor could stomach classical Marxism.
During the mid-1800’s, Marx’s family subsisted in London poverty while he exhausted his paltry income on foreign newspaper subscriptions. Poor guy, poor family.
He thought the proletariat’s inferior status was based on financial hardship in particular, rather than lack of valid information in general. He concluded this despite the fact that high and low finances are mere subsets of total information content and flow.
The Victorian media’s gee-whiz reports of high-tech telegraph and railroad marvels convinced him that human communications had reached a new pinnacle of perfection. If world communications had reached such heights, Marx could have gotten his high-quality news for pennies or less a month.
Still today, we are not so fine-tuned. So-called ‘free’ information is the most heavily distorted. It costs a lot of time and money to acquire objective news without a toxin load of negative bias and special-interest agenda. Indeed, information is bias and agenda, it must be. But couldn’t we fine-tune that information flow such that bias and agenda became those of peace: positive bias and general-interest agenda?
In an optimal communications milieu, Marx could have bartered his analytical brilliance for a more than comfortable salary. That was not the case then and is not so now (I may serve as an example).
He hoped his money-proletarians would refuse to fight brother workers from foreign countries. After all, they had more in common with each other than with their money-elites. How wrong he was! Across Europe, Worker Party bosses caved in to national chauvinists and got their followers to massacre each other during two World Wars and many more rubber stamped since.
Modern Labor Union leaders are at the forefront of ecological devastation, organized crime and status-quo militarism. They defend these shameful activities in the name of ‘saving jobs.’ They have great difficulty agreeing with their progressive ‘allies’ (even though both are just as incompetent at peace) and confronting their common ‘enemies’ among corporate weapon management. It is easier for them to oppose progressive ideals and submit to corporate tyranny, it is easiest for them to fatten themselves and their bureaucracies on dwindling union dues and swelling corporate payoffs—and do as little as possible otherwise. I have outreached to them and been rejected by them without exception.
Growing numbers of rank-and-file workers have voted – with their feet and wallets – against them and their insane policies. Those who didn’t, saw their jobs fly overseas, in the name of “global economic efficiency.”
Famous holdouts against this militarist insanity were Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their Spartacist disciples. Fellow labor leaders betrayed these peace martyrs to German proto-Nazis between the world wars. They were brutally murdered. Given this salutary example, no Labor organizations and activists remain to fight for Peace. Instead, they struggle mightily for second- and third-rate considerations—as does every institution “acceptable” to weapon managers.
Marx never explained how his proletarians could agree with each other, with him and with his extraordinary conclusions. How could they, without absorbing all the information he had acquired so painfully and without communicating freely among themselves? In most cases, that kind of communication was forbidden. The police of the day made sure that would not happen, and Communist Party bosses made just as sure that their subordinates would never discuss such things freely.
The key to proletarian subjugation was information starvation and it remains information starvation. Lack of money is just a symptom and consequence of information starvation. No one ever got this message out before Learners; no one has paid enough attention to it since.
We have been deprived of the following information: we are powerless because we are missing vital information. What’s more, it never occurred to us to demand better information. We were satisfied with the information (mostly junk info, like junk food) we were allowed to collect despite every institutional obstacle placed before us while we struggled to acquire it. It seemed neither possible nor practical to collect more and better information. The transformation of society to make that happen was unthinkable.
This oversight was Karl Marx’s gravest error. Given this bitter error, his subsequent conclusions are no more valid than those of his coeval philosophers before and since. We can no more dismiss the weapon/peace dialectic from a valid analysis of the politics of information, than discount gravity from the accurate calculation of orbital mechanics.
Otherwise, we must content ourselves with orthodox political analysis – the equivalent of Earth-centered epicycles and stars embedded in crystal spheres – published persistently since. Two thousand years of retardation in our political analysis! We require the equivalent of a Copernican political system to replace the centralized Earth of weapon mentality with the majestic Sun of peace mentality—so as to do a better job. Emery Reves scooped me on this analogy in his Anatomy of Peace, Harpers & Brothers Publishers, 1945 & 1946, reprinted in 1995.
Another weapon myth attributes significant ‘freedoms’ to economies bound by weapon requirements. We will discuss a few economic implications of the weapon/peace dialectic in another chapter of Learners.
Weapons economies may be hunter/gatherer, they may be herder, agricultural (“First Wave” according to the Tofflers of Future Shock fame), industrial (Second Wave) or informational (Third Wave). They may be decentralized or collective, openly or secretly militaristic; they may be particularistic (favoring a few individuals) or totalitarian (favoring no one for very long). Weapon management may be based on precedent, authority or self-interest. Each alternative fosters mass coercion, injustice, war and wastage of talent and resources—regardless of (and directly contradicting) the cant weapon managers use to promote themselves.
Pandemic unemployment, homelessness, statelessness, refugee status, famine, epidemics and genocide through tribal warfare (at once barbaric-primitive and techno-sophisticated) are routine methods of mass human disposal these days. We dub these government-accelerated catastrophes ‘complex disasters.’ As if they could be anything but complex? As we harden our heart to this infamy, our leaders ratify our heartlessness by pocketing more wealth. The end result is a ‘lifeboat philosophy’ that consigns the weak to the sharks.
What absurd reasoning shackled us to this slave galley? If we are stuck in an overcrowded lifeboat, let’s waste no more time choosing whom to drown at gunpoint. Instead, set every hand to bail or row, every stick and stitch to the wind, the prow for the nearest sea lane/landfall, and then, praying to any God we choose, row like hell!
What is the root cause of human exploitation? Marx lists several periods of exploitation, including such ones as the slave/master, serf/lord and proletarian/bourgeois. With today’s corporate dictatorship, he might let us add the individual isolate versus the government-corporate bureaucrat. Learners lumps these rivalries under the headings Info(rmation) Proletariat and Info(rmation) Elite. This word pair forms another dichotomy and dialectic that Learners must understand with absolute clarity.
Marx filled many a page to narrate the economic shell game that wily bourgeois (boorjwah, burghers, middle-class people) play when they inflate the value of labor’s handiwork beyond its production costs. They enrich themselves from the difference at the expense of the proletariat. Well, duh.
But if upper classmates merely fattened themselves in idle opulence, everyone could benefit from trickle-down wealth. After all, comfort-loving bourgeois would pay a pretty penny for superior goods and services, fully employing the rest. They’d hardly begrudge an extra few more to secure their precious law and order. Welfare states are cheaper to mismanage than ruinous, ham-fisted police states. That first kind of weapon state is more profitable, too, except compared to peace states. Nations at total peace would be much more profitable, but incredibly vulnerable to military aggression.
Instead, somewhere along the line, most of this wealth gets thrown away – deliberately and pointlessly – and never recirculates. Marx never noted this wastage. Despite his exhaustive analysis, he offered no safeguard against the next rabble of wasteful opportunists: Mafiosi, arbitrageurs, Communist apparatchiki, ‘deregulated’ corporate managers, corporate/governmental/labor leaders, politically correct politicians (gratifying the needs of the rich: see our last seven Presidents), and the like. He refused to distinguish good administrators from bad ones.
According to the German social scientist, Robert Michels, there is an Iron Law of oligarchy. As soon as human beings put together an organization, power gravitates to its permanent officers. Regardless of the organization’s original purpose, its primary goal will become the preservation and growth of the organization and of its oligarchy, no matter how corrupting that tendency becomes.
No one prior to Learners has figured out how to use that tendency for the greater good, instead of submitting to its corruption. Like an old judoka master confronting a younger and more powerful antagonist, we could use the opponent’s tendencies and promote the greater good instead.
Similarly, Marx wrote a lot about the “alienation of labor.” He did not give a valid reason why members of the proletariat must hate themselves and their miserable work. He merely described this sentence of self-loathing as another example of the bourgeoisie’s broad-brush, vicious and unreasonable abuse.
Learners shows a clear reason why members of the intellectual proletariat must despise themselves and their place in the scheme of things. Alienation produces political powerlessness quite reliably. An information proletariat alienated to the point of powerlessness, consents to maximum weapon technology.
Emotionally secure people, in love with their world and with each other, would find a thousand reasons to challenge weapon mentality; they would sabotage weapon technology and block weapon managers at every opportunity. The way we would never dare to, since we have been so thoroughly alienated. If a nation must defend itself militarily, it must forbid this sabotage, make it impossible. Mass alienation is an effective way to prevent mutinous pacifism from uprooting protective fascism.
Let’s discuss this alienation some more.
“The new economic order (of the 19th Century) was
indifferent to every form of community or association, destroying the customary
associations of village, guild and peasant community.” Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by
War: The Intellectuals and 1914, The Regents Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas,
1982, p. 90.
Alienation is cultivated during decades of cultural mediocrity, insignificant social pecking orders and philistine materialism. Once warfare erupts, this alienation congeals into its antithesis: a passionate and overwhelming tribal in-gathering and sacrifice of the fearsome Other.
Rich and poor, plebian and elite, reactionary and progressive, illiterate and intellectual: every citizen feels the tug of this holy ingathering that trivializes past differences and re-imposes a sense of community banned during peacetime. When two countries go to war, both populations will harmonize their internal differences and contradictions before coming to blows with one another.
The reasons and justifications for this war may be fallacious, trivial, absurd or a fabric of lies; its consequence, seem disastrous to anyone who cares to note them. Thoughtful voices may speak out against it. Reasonable people, who might see through this mess under other circumstances, will fall into step in any case. The same cultural, educational and newsgathering institutions that promoted stupid and spiteful alienation during peacetime, will jump at the chance to rekindle the torch of atavistic tribalism. Everyone experiences an exalted sense of belonging that he or she could never feel (was never encouraged to feel) under normal circumstances.
This emotional earthquake rocked Europe at the beginning of World War I and America right after 9/11. It’s most remarkable feature? Perfectly rational people, the entire intellectual elite tasked with safeguarding society’s collective conscience, jump from routine cosmopolitanism and tepid pacifism, (“Shouldn’t we go to war less often and only for the best reasons?”) straight into nationalistic bigotry and warfare hysteria.
Once this war has claimed its tyrant’s share of victims, these same intellectuals will revert to their default, brainless middle-of-the-roadism. They could not, to save their lives, describe what possessed them to turn into such blaring warmongers. Their recall of this transformation will leave them speechless. Quietly, they will forget their exalted fugue—as if it never happened.
In a society that prides itself in compulsively reporting the latest pop star’s latest belch, no research is allowed on this taboo topic. Then again, the entire weapon/peace antinomy is off-limits. Good God, why?
The only practical outcome of each communist revolution was the traumatic transformation of feudal societies, based on subsistence agriculture, into well-armed, military-industrial states that could hold their own against any aggressor. Otherwise, feudal states could never defend themselves against industrialized nations that had nurtured their weapon technologies at long and bloody leisure.
Western colonial expansion was based on the military imbalance between industrial states, on one hand, and feudal societies and pre-feudal peoples, on the other. Pampered feudal dynasties and their military elites were too busy suppressing local revolts and peripheral native uprisings. They never bothered to develop proficient defenses against better-armed Western armies. Subsistence feudalism never produced the enormous economic surpluses, the despised and under-employed workforce and the belching smokestack industries those armies required.
Yet – at tremendous sacrifice and virtually overnight – Communist states managed to produce those things quite reliably. Then they proceeded to checkmate Western aggressors from any provenance.
Communism is a toxic vaccine that feudal societies must self-administer to immunize themselves against the hyper-organized assault of weapon National Capitalism.
“Virtually every aspect of the development of capitalism,
from the rapid advance of technology, transport and communications to the
evolution of new class forces and the political and ideological responses to
them, had a major military significance.
To adopt the traditional sociological terminology, social changes had
both the socio-economic functions which were ‘manifest’ to contemporaries and
social theorists, and military functions which were much more ‘latent’.
“Mass militarism can be seen, as it was for example by Karl
Liebknecht in 1907, as the form of warfare appropriate to capitalism. But there is also a sense in which industrial
capitalism and parliamentary democracy were the social and political forms
required by a new form of state militarism.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was
clear that both political nationalism and direct military needs would have
social implications. Imperialism begat
social reforms; the inadequacy of the labour (sic)
supplied to the armed forces (for example, in Britain during the South African
war) stimulated concern at the health and diet of the working class. Warfare had always had implications for
welfare, but at the beginning of the 20th century it was a
recognizable motor for change. The First
World War greatly accelerated this change, particularly by expanding
expectations among working people themselves – expectations which were to be
disappointed in the aftermath of the war.”
Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of
Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 74-75.
With respect to the impact of war on the development of the State, please consult Bruce D. Porter’s very convincing War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics, The Free Press, Macmillan, Inc., New York, 1994. Nailing his analysis down with literally hundreds of examples from history, Porter lists the political effects of war as follows:
Formative and Organizing Effects
Territorial Coalescence
Unifying Effect
Centralizing Effect
Bureaucratizing Effect
Government Growth
Fiscal Effect
Ratchet Effect (prior effects don’t disappear after each war)
Opportunity for Leadership
Disintegrative Effects
Total State Destruction
Catalyst of Revolution
Diminished Capacity
Fiscal Collapse
Reformative Effects
Integrative Effect
Socializing Effect
Social-leveling Effect
Spur to Social Reform
I hesitate to quote more from Porter; I would wind up filling a new volume of Learners with citations from his work.
He throws the following sop to academic orthodoxy before he packs the next three hundred pages with demonstrations of the exact opposite.
“What this book will not do is postulate a military dialectic of
history. War is a profound agent of
historical change, but it is not the fundamental driving force of history. Whatever causes war – economic factors, class
conflict, human nature, modes of production, technological change, divine will
– is by definition [how convenient!] a more basic causal agent than war
itself. No matter how ubiquitous or
profound the effects of war may be, war itself is a derivative and secondary phenomenon,
never [sic] a prime moving force. By the
same token, war should never be seen as an exogenous force that acts on states
and societies from without; it derives rather from within them. When we say that war causes a given political
effect, we should keep in mind that this is only a convenient shorthand; what
really happens is that state leaders, governments, military officers, armies,
and populations, in waging war and in coping with its myriad challenges, cause those
effects to occur.” p. 4.
[NOTE: In the same way, I suppose, that apples, planets and
stars, in coping with gravity, cause its motions to occur without being
directly affected by it as an independent force; or animals, in coping with
evolution, cause corporeal development to occur in the same way. What unadulterated academic crap!]
These last few lines from Porter sound much like the retraction submitted by Galileo to the Catholic Church, written for the same reason of bureaucratic survival. Some friendly reviewer must have warned Porter, when he appraised his manuscript: “You had better insert a denial of ‘military dialectics,’ no matter how summary and telegraphic; otherwise, you run the risk of being blacklisted by academia.”
The academic community has served as weapons mentality’s lap dog for far too long, to honestly address the weapons/peace antinomy (or dialectic).
Recall the weapon maxim, whether from capitalist or communist lips: “Arm yourself to the teeth beforehand or submit to enslavement.” Never mind that the enslavement of weapon mentality and of military defeat are identical. In the final analysis, we cannot distinguish between national sovereignty and personal enslavement. One creates the other. But we may choose between the enslavement of WeaponWorld and the emancipation of PeaceWorld.
Do the unknowns of PeaceWorld seem more terrifying to you than the comforting bloody-mindedness of good old WeaponWorld? So what? Get over your hypnotized panic!
Communist militants never intended to create a socialist paradise. That was just another weapon myth carrot dangled in front of feudal information proletariats. The revolutionary vanguard’s real goal was to crash-optimize homegrown military technologies, despite the backwardness of feudal populations and especially of their backward elites.
Despite Marx’s warnings, every so-called Marxist society became equally tainted with weapon dogma. Peace idealists were gulaged and/or executed—just as often, in practical terms, as they were disempowered and marginalized in Capitalist societies. Like other weapon societies, Marxist ones supported wasteful, forbidden forms of weapon parasitism: minority dictatorship, class privilege, internal and external genocide, slave labor, secret police, premeditated mismanagement and worker alienation; actually, universal alienation that cut off communications, most especially between the info elite and the info proletariat, amputating valid communications between them. Such contradictions rotted out the fabric of every Communist society.
Thus, every Communist experiment turned into an exercise in barracks Communism, despite all the ideological cant written against barracks Communism. Every contradiction Marx deplored will exist in every weapon state, whether it adheres to National Marxism, National Capitalism or any other form of militarist self-deception.
The same thing happened during the French Revolution. Marx noted it and then forgot about it.
Power-drunk American information elites never tire of toasting their ‘triumph’ over Communism. Yet, despite their ragged masses, Russia and China have amassed enough nukes to protect themselves against any but the most suicidal opponent. Communism has served its main function. Consequently, it is being sloughed off like an old snakeskin.
Even though Capitalism is just as necrotic, we refuse to let the rotten appendage fall off and graft something healthier to the stump. We persist instead in absorbing its gangrene toxins, and intend to transfuse that stinking pus into ex-communist societies, to their obvious detriment.
By any rational accounting, weapon societies are tainted goods destined for the scrap heap of history. Capitalism’s fantasy ‘victory’ over Das Kapital has not reduced class struggle by one iota. It has merely made the conflict murkier and more intractable.
What is the basis of government power? Government strength is not in capital, as Scandinavian socialists have proven and the Great Depression confirmed. Capital ebbs and flows at the whim of the very rich.
By “very rich,” I mean those whose wealth is so old and huge, they have become transparent to journalistic and legalistic review. They are so rich that their insider trading on the world’s stock markets is not only legal but expected, so rich that the world’s best-paid corporate CEOs and grandest government dignitaries are their errand boys.
I doubt if enough people understand the incredible cumulative power of interest compounded over hundreds of years, and the unimaginable wealth that would place in certain people’s hands. It is illegal to do that kind of thing, nowadays – harvest the fruit of generations of circular interest – but it wasn’t in the past. Its interest rate could have been very low and thus certain; its current beneficiaries, totally unfit to control it. None of that would matter. They would be enormously wealthy and powerful in any case. Learners addresses them in particular—even if they benefit more than anyone else from this transformation, we will benefit as well.
The relationship that the very rich hold with info elites they tower over, and with the info proletariat that sprawls beneath their telescopic spire, is this:
· Information proletarians are like animals in a zoo. They are under total control and have no idea what’s going on, beyond a few reassuring routines they value most. They have been trained since infancy to value nothing else.
· Weapon managers are like zoo attendants. They have near-total control over the animals under their care and some awareness of what’s going on, but very little over their own decision-making and job security.
· The very rich resemble the board of directors of the zoo. They manage the two lower levels, while remaining remote from them and invisible.
What is actually in charge of the zoo? You could call it a mental value hidden in some recess of the human spirit, which esteems above all the satisfaction of its curiosity and dominion over the natural world. All three layers of actors, their future and class settings depend on the commands of this spiritual value.
Each tidal surge of finance – inflationary or deflationary – enriches those peak Conspirators of Greed at everyone else’s expense. Each surge of militaristic panic strengthens weapon managers at the peril of everyone else. Each information manipulation, deprivation and degradation seems to simplify the task of controlling the inferior class. Weapon mentality is the spiritual value that drives this process.
Government power is not a matter of military might, either. Muscle-bound military states so threatened their neighbors that they were overwhelmed by numbers, or so overtaxed their economies that they drove themselves to ruin; as Russia did a few years ago and as the USA is doing today.
When I mention ‘weapon technology,’ please avoid the caricature of stomping jackboots, bad brass bands and hysterical demagogues. Please don’t confound weapon mentality with its subset of fascist militarism. Humans have attempted this sick parody altogether too often. Its unforeseen consequences have always been disastrous, quite predictably.
If armies of barracks bullies and pampered thugs replace competent police and effective administrators, they lose their military edge against a foreign army, even an equally rotted one. Even the deadliest modern weapon state must hoard a substantial measure of peace technology.
As paradoxically demonstrated by Western democracies, the more lethal a weapon state, the greater its perceived distribution of peace benefits. Mozart and Peter Gabriel, kindness and light, gardening, ersatz (fake) forms of political empowerment: a hocus pocus of civility must be artfully compartmentalized and subordinated to the primary, killing goals of a weapon society.
The actual key to political power lies in communications—just as the key to individual empowerment is information acquisition. When conspirators plot insurrection, radio and TV stations are among their first targets for takeover. Thanks for this illustration, Paul Lackman.
Weapon states assert their sovereignty by restricting and simplifying social transactions, internal as well as external. Civilizations grow as mighty, rich and free as they allow their communications to grow complex. This happens in obedience to an Armchair Formula we shall review in its own chapter.
Weapon states deliberately sabotage their civil communications, the better to ‘control’ them. This fantasy control of information flow requires that current communications be subverted and their future growth be deliberately delayed. This deterioration must induce additional poverty; its fearless reversal, abundance in direct proportion to military vulnerability.
A sophisticated people may operate by virtue of liberal laws (in the positive sense of the term, since inverted by weapon mentality into its antonym, in English as well as French), and call itself free because of them. However, its dialogue can be homogenized by idolized sports and televised soap opera trivia; by patent discord between the polarized adherents of black-and-white ideologies; by paralyzing legalisms; by some mechanical doctrine, church liturgy or ideological dogma; by a tyrant’s mad ravings; by the obsessive narration of trivial but dramatic crimes; or by a tsunami of commercial blather. Anything will do to distract public attention from the weapon/peace dialectic and drown out public commentary about it.
See the top five hundred key words searched on the Internet: (http://www.searchengineguide.com/wt/2011/0118_wt1.html). You will be surprised how useless and trivial the majority of them are.
These intellectual contaminants are broadcast most readily through monologue (one-way) mass media. All by themselves, monologue media reduce communications by at least an order of magnitude. Exactly the same transmission channels, adjusted such that half the information flowed in each direction, could carry at least ten times or more (perhaps a thousand of times more) useful information.
These communications equal information flow, societal wealth, and how many hundreds and thousands of times more real dollars each of us could dispose of without inflation—regardless of the ideological cant that affirms otherwise. A multitude of personal interactions and complex dialogues generate peace technology’s abundance.
Divided, please note, by the sum of harmful communications.
As these dialogues grow and spread beyond centralized control, they threaten to destabilize a weapon hierarchy by increasing its vulnerability to internal and external extremists.
To forestall this destabilization, weapon propagandists boost the volume, saturation and repetition of official monologue; they simplify public reality until it turns into a caricature of nature. This is how the info proletariat is overawed into dead-end weapon dissidence, hysterical paralysis and social autism.
Apparent differences between National Capitalist and National Communist weapon states are strictly situational, which is to say they are based on their perception of geo-strategic threats.
Put the American population between Europe, Iran, South Asia, China and Mongolia; and that of the former Soviet Union, between Mexico, Canada, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Americans would have become militaristic bullies sooner, while the Russians would have baked a more liberal flavor into their tyranny. Leaving them in their own homelands, the Russians would have liberalized sooner if they could have blocked every invader far beyond their borders; and the Americans would have become overt totalitarians sooner if they had fought their climax defensive battles on the banks of the Mississippi—the way the Russians had to, on the banks of the Volga.
It is merely a question of the nature, size and proximity of the armed hordes we think we have got to hold off.
Apply current threat levels posed by transcontinental nuke, chemical, scalar and biological assault. It doesn’t matter whether those warheads are rammed through by ballistic missile, broadcast and triangulated (like laser holograms) by highly energized scalar antenna arrays, or borne in cheap suitcases by sweat-soaked fanatics. Watch both societies, plus all the others on Earth, doom themselves to cumulative military despotism and eventual omnicide (“Kill everything that lives!”): the ultimate simplification of information flow…
…Unless, by some 3rd Millennium miracle, a critical mass of wise people across the planet sparks a Learner transformation.
Thanks to the World Wide Web – this semi-dialogue system that allowed you to call up this text, and me, to send it to you freely – we may hope that such a transformation takes place despite our worst fears and prejudices.
Will you and your friends participate in this transition into a peaceful 3rd Millennium? Or will you remain placid spectators to it—or, worse yet, dogmatic antagonists who favor weapon mentality?
Read on, Learner activists …
These pages outline the Why, How and What of the World Peace that awaits us. This book is not about sermons, but about results. Are you interested? If not, ask yourself, “Why not?”
Body count x distance / time 2
Civilization ceaselessly refines a threat formula stuffed with many more constants and variables. Recorded history is just a misleading review of this compulsive refinement.
Humanity has forgotten as much peace technology as its collective memory has retained weapon know-how. Infant mortality, per capita calories eaten, songs sung: such variables have fluctuated, plateaued, spiked up and down, and soon been forgotten. Meanwhile, weapon requirements were faithfully retained by our collective memory. Weapon management is all that we excel at.
Weapon management has never secured its adherents’ safety for very long. The closer we cleave to weapon technology, the likelier we will be crushed during its next paroxysm, along with everything we hold dear.
Nonetheless, each nation identifies a multitude of strategic threats – both at home and abroad – and coordinates a vast array of technologies and behaviors to sustain its threat counter-deterrent.
From Trinidad to Tiananmen Square, every modern state is optimized for war. Every country may go to war immediately, fight indefinitely or be devastated in minutes. Every modern nation-state is a masterpiece of weapon management.
We have forgotten most real peace technologies and mentalities (whether based on religion or ideology), even those basic ones adopted by earlier weapon civilizations less defensible than ours. Everything peaceful that we accept today, we’ve forgotten repeatedly and had to relearn painstakingly and often.
By definition, pure peace management is ‘prehistoric.’ It is beyond the purview of our historic records because our history has destroyed it.
Weapon technology diverts peacetime economies from sustainable levels of development and productivity. Even in times of peace, many workers are idled to satisfy military recruitment demands. Many peace technologies are rejected as cost-inefficient (such as solar energy and wind power). On the other hand, ruinous weapon technologies get double and triple subsidies. Nuclear power, for example, demands at least fivefold fortunes: one for construction, one for operation and three more for downstream decontamination, security and radioactive waste disposal. A typical weapon, ruinous from a peace technology point of view.
“In an analysis published in 1998, Norman Myers and Jennifer
Kent of Oxford University placed annual subsidies worldwide at $390 billion to
$520 billion in agriculture, $110 billion in fossil fuels and nuclear energy,
and $220 billion for water. All these
and other subsides combined exceed $2 trillion, much of which is harmful to
both our economies and our governments.
The average American pays $2,000 a year in subsidies, giving the lie to
the belief that the American economy runs in a truly free competitive
market. An additional heavy price,
difficult to measure but nevertheless substantial, is levied on the natural
environment, which carries the burden of extraction and consumption.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A.
Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 184.
Inadequate education and unemployment never reduce inflation, even though controlling inflation has been a routine justification for the abuse of deliberate unemployment. Unemployment never solves economic problems; it worsens them.
During World War II – despite total mobilization and full employment – America eliminated inflation by taxing military-industrial profits and redistributing this wealth through GI Bill handouts and foreign aid programs to Europe (the Marshall Plan), Japan and ‘little tigers’ of Asia. The Swedish people and government did so – from the end of World War II until its end-of-century backslice into just another McDonald’s parking lot – by taxing everyone and everything, then spending this fortune on massive public works, full employment and social benefits.
On the other hand, crimes and riots multiply with mass unemployment, so do recruitment rates for the Harm (Armed) Forces, so does the quality of their recruits. And so do weapon mentors thrive like maggots in carrion.
Criminal, industrial, environmental and tax wastage have this in common. Like a beached whale recently butchered on a beach, they leave strips of financial blubber lying around during peacetime. These can be recycled more efficiently during future military emergencies.
This is why weapon managers never figure out how to control routine injustice, unpunished crime and economic inefficiency. These proliferate in peacetime, despite well-meant attempts to eliminate them. Reinvested more efficiently in times of war, this gross peacetime wastage pays for unforeseen but critical military projects.
Getting a weapon state to operate with justice and efficiency would be like getting a garbage dump to smell like roses. You can do it, mind you: just cover the garbage with topsoil and plant roses. But it wouldn’t be a garbage dump any longer. Weapon technologies cannot be turned into efficient peace technologies without destroying them and without exposing their destroyers to better-armed, more reactionary weapon technicians, both at home and abroad.
National reputation is another key factor in the weapons equation. How successfully have previous wars ended? How often has the army been victorious? How often defeated? Paradoxically, defeated armies often make much more dangerous adversaries than those enjoying a long run of success. Surviving military defeat and restoring political cohesion are much more demanding governmental tasks than managing victory. It takes superior leadership to turn military defeat into long-term success. Any fool can manage a victorious nation. Haven’t more than one of them been doing so, lately? The losers’ better leaders are more likely to defeat post-victory mediocre ones, the next time around.
General George Patton asserted that no one ever won a war by standing on the defensive. The American war experience in Vietnam, and that of the Russians and Americans in Afghanistan, would have baffled him as much as they did his John Wayne peers, Capitalist and Communist alike. No doubt he would have demanded that we nuke the lot. The way French generals tried to get the Americans to do, during the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Indochina—drop a nuke (atomics, actually) on the Vietminh Army that French generals had assembled into an enormous target, by deploying their elite troops as bait in the bull’s-eye.
Actually, no one has ever achieved decisive military victory. Such victories are subject to the material imperfections of other worldly events. Alexander the Gross of Macedon came close to total victory, but his triumphs cost him his life and his empire.
America may boast that it won both World Wars, hands down. However, its many war dead since World War II, its bloated military-industrial-prison complex, collapsing civilian infrastructure, ignorant students and doltish, conniving leadership give the lie to this rosy scenario.
In total war, the bravest, most dutiful, idealistic and diligent fall at the forefront of battle. Incompetents, cowards, mental fossils and timeservers are left, by and large, to pick up the pieces. Thus Europe took decades to recover from its Paroxysms, America never recovered from its Civil War, and the ex-Communist powers are just emerging from their traumatized comas. A nation ravaged by total war resembles a stroke victim who slowly recovers the use of her palsied limbs, voice and memory.
Eventually, every empire falls prey to such internal contradictions. Only a superb organization can absorb vicious losses and emerge with long-lasting success. Following defeat, surviving peace technicians (the best of them lost in combat as small unit leaders and gentlemen soldiers, or massacred by both sides as defenseless community leaders – teachers, doctors, priests and such) mend a frayed social fabric, replenish an exhausted production base and reassure a shaken public. Once they have restored a modest infrastructure of peace as best they could, weapon managers re-emerge, re-assert their illicit control and resume their routine abuse.
I cannot imagine what our civilization would look like if so many artists, good folk and brilliant thinkers had not perished in war. No doubt, world culture would be far more brilliant, refined and meaningful—much less cluttered with bad-taste values, mass-produced junk and the literary, philosophical and political trivia favored by the vicious mediocrities that war spares and promotes in their place.
A defeated society’s survival technique is more interesting to study than ‘successful’ military empires we are coached to analyze and revere. These tend to collapse at the death of their charismatic originator or at their first serious defeat. Besides, the history of peace mentality is a staccato of well-intentioned flops that culminated in absolute defeat. Post-defeat strategies should stimulate Learner curiosity.
We may draw certain conclusions about weapon dissidents. Their endless defeats make them as hungry for success as they are clueless how to achieve it. Unfortunately, they are just as headstrong about the validity of their futile tactics, as they are oblivious to their total failure, past and present. Like crazy people locked in an inescapable box, they repeat the same empty distractions over and over again, expecting different and better results.
Reactionaries have one tremendous advantage over these ineffectual progressives. Their leaders needn’t be admirable. On the contrary, better that they were harsh, judgmental, arbitrary and punitive. A sense of humor is unnecessary: the last refuge of the weak. Any plausible deviation from these extremes can be accepted as a hypocritical tactic and the deviationist, appreciated for his ability to hoodwink the credulous. Conservatives will choose a cad, a mediocrity, a smooth-talking con man or an obvious idiot—so long as he embraces Conspiracies of Greed with sufficient gusto. Reactionaries require no rational policies. On the contrary, the more emotional, simplistic, escapist, self-serving and prejudicial they are, the better. Their basic appeal (in code, if necessary) is to greed, panic, bigotry, self-pity and unjustified entitlement. In fact, having no policy at all, beyond a few ad hominem clichés, just reduces their vulnerability to rational criticism.
Many conservative politicians have based successful careers on fraud, deceit, blackmail and worse—shared only by those in the know. The most admired among them focus their malice against select prey minorities. If their routine wrongdoing had been publicized, it would have spun them into political oblivion, (Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Kurt Waldheim, Radovan Karadzic, George W. Bush, etc.). Unfortunately, they are shielded by information elites just as corrupt.
It has been a long-standing habit of reactionary Americans to hog-tie the United Nations, lobotomize the State Department and plant troglodyte leaders in the intelligence community. The less mastery these organizations display, the more warfare and crises in the world, and the more wartime profits their slimeball patrons may extract.
After generations of this kind of abuse without correction, all we can expect from those agencies are shoulder-shrugging ineptitude, bureaucratic stagnation, behind-the-scenes mayhem, bigot shadism and media-driven panic-mongering. Gigantic tax receipts go straight into the pockets of the worst crooks they can find, both at home and abroad.
Progressives, on the other hand, hesitate to back any leader; they expect some Moses to lead them into the Promised Land. Anyone whose sainthood isn’t certified to their satisfaction isn't worthy of their devotion. This moralistic ambiguity is their greatest glory and most consistent weakness. The Perfect Leader they await so placidly can be assassinated with ease. That clears the political landscape for certified reactionaries and bandits for another generation or two, century or two; until the next charismatic target has the guts to stand up and get shot down just as promptly, and so forth.
They don’t realize this one vital truth: that the Perfection of Voice and Vision they await so patiently resides in their collective superconscience. There, it is immune from political assassination and character defect. Progressives are too panicked to take the initial step of rallying together, regardless of personal and organizational weakness. They’d rather delegate the risk and responsibility for social transformation to the alluring mirage of some Messiah shimmering in a distant, hazy future. What moral cowards!
Many foreign conquests have merely been ambitious pillaging expeditions dreamt up by a few junior middlemen. Insignificant militarists, shopkeepers, politicos and religious fanatics have conspired to ice chests of red ink and red gore on reluctant, metropolitan bureaucrats.
As to the influence of the rich, well:
“Every great political act involving a new flow of capital,
or a large fluctuation in the values of existing investments, must receive the
sanction and the practical aid of this little group of financial kings…
“To create new public debts, to float new companies, and to
cause constant, considerable fluctuations of values are three conditions of
their profitable business. Each condition carries them
into politics, and throws them on the side of Imperialism.
“The public financial arrangements for the Philippine war
put several millions of dollars into the pockets of Mr. Pierpont Morgan and his
friends; the China-Japan war, which saddled the Celestial Empire for the first
time with a public debt, and the indemnity which she will pay to her European
invaders in connection with the recent conflict, brings grist to the financial
mills in Europe. Every railway or mining
concession wrung from some reluctant foreign potentate means profitable
business in raising capital and floating companies. A policy which rouses fears of
aggression … and which fans the rivalry of commercial nations … evokes vast
expenditure on armaments, and ever-accumulating public debts, while the doubts
and risks accruing from this policy promote that constant oscillation of values
of securities which is so profitable to the skilled financier. There is not a war, a revolution, an anarchist
assassination, or any other public shock, which is not gainful to these men;
they are harpies who suck their gains from every new forced expenditure and
every sudden disturbance of public credit…
“The policy of these men, it is true, does not necessarily
make for war; where war would bring about too great and too permanent a damage
to substantial fabric of industry, which is the ultimate and essential basis of
speculation, their influence is cast for peace, [author’s note: this was
written before World War I, which permanently refuted this conclusion]… But every increase of public expenditure, every
oscillation of public credit short of this collapse, every risky enterprise in
which public resources can be made the pledge of private speculations, is
profitable to the big money-lender and speculator.
…
“In view of the part which the non-economic factors of
patriotism, adventure, military enterprise, political ambition, and
philanthropy play in imperial expansion, it may appear that to impute to
financiers so much power is to take a too narrowly economic view of
history. And it is true that the
motor-power of Imperialism is not chiefly financial: finance is rather the
governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining its work: it does not
constitute the fuel of the engine, nor does it directly generate the power. Finance manipulates the patriotic forces which politicians,
soldiers, philanthropists, and traders generate; the enthusiasm for expansion
which issues from these sources, though strong and genuine, is irregular and
blind; the financial interest has those qualities of concentration and
clear-sighted calculation which are needed to set Imperialism to work. An ambitious statesman, a frontier soldier, an overzealous
missionary, a pushing trader, may suggest or even initiate a step of imperial expansion, may assist in educating patriotic public opinion
to the urgent need of some fresh advance, but the final determination rests
with the financial power. The direct
influence exercised by great financial houses in ‘high politics’ is supported
by the control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the
Press, which, in every ‘civilized’ country, is becoming more and more their
obedient instrument…” Imperialism: A Study, by J. A.
Hobson, George Allen & Unvin Ltd., London, 1902,
Fourth Impression, 1948, pp. 57-60. (Italics mine).
A situation fraught with disturbance, fear and uncertainty generates the greatest profit for an elite few. The favorite con of the very rich is to bring the hottest spark of confrontation to the thickest explosive cloud of international tension, without igniting the pool of gasoline in which we’re all floundering.
Thus the Cold War left us with a hundred and fifty million more war dead, billions more casualties from preventable starvation and disease, and uncounted millions of refugees. It served as a lush nursery for war profiteers.
As long as they succeed at this bloody game, they earn themselves unimaginable wealth. But let them fail for just an instant, and boom! There go their own kids along with almost everyone else’s, down the drain of total war.
Learners will defy these procedures. From their perspective, an excellent, fully informed foreign policy would induce the worst possible climate for high-risk investment: too boring, not enough uncertainty for distant victims. Too much personal recognition, too many intimate interactions (“How are the kids?”) and expressions of mutual esteem. Nobody would be left, ignored enough to serve en masse as a dehumanized victims ripe for profit taking. No one would expose his fellows, near or distant, to the likelihood of such disasters, no matter how improbable. No more profit in that and a lot more hassles.
Effective international policy will apply minimal force to reduce world tensions. In cosmopolitan interactions, the clearly superior community would sacrifice minor concessions to re-stabilize things after each crisis. Local moderates will gain full support, while Prisms and Chaosists will be disarmed using minimal force. This policy will frustrate high-risk speculators on Earth. Learners will shift their focus to outer space, where their addiction to crisis would do the most good.
In Learner management, every instrument would serve in its proper place, operating in relative cooperation and harmony with its counterparts, doing only what it does best and leaving the rest up to something or someone better qualified. Never again weapon management: some institutionalized cult or ideology (no matter how seductive) attempting to dominate every other, overwhelming all before it by brute force and failing to control anything effectively. It would seem apparent that only God could control everything under the sun; not any one ideology or institution that man had come up with and enforced at gun point.
When weapon policies curdle into massacre and disaster, they cannot be characterized as ‘failures’ or ‘errors,’ as we have been led to consider them. Instead, weapon managers deliberately worsen vicious outcomes. After every disaster and mass crime, we are left to ponder, “What went wrong?” The answer? “Nothing went wrong. Everything went strictly according to weapon management’s plans.”
Every time we mistake the monstrous consequences of deliberate weapon management, for those of petty greed, insanity or stupidity – each just as insignificant – we help weapon managers cover their tracks.
We cannot even consider total nuclear war as a weapon management failure. After all, once they resort to their sting, warrior bees die. This fatal consequence does not prevent bees from stinging a threatening target. And they can flatter themselves, with their last flicker of consciousness, that they have done their honorable duty. The same thing goes for nuclear holocausters to whom we’ve granted the means of ending civilized life on this planet, in defense of values that might or might not be legitimate.
Arms embargoes don’t work, either. Legitimate regimes and peoples suffer the brunt of bilateral (‘even-handed’) arms embargos. Weapons embargoes have failed during the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Yugoslav Crisis, the interval between the Iraq Wars, and at other times and places.
All justice forfeit, an Aggressor’s first reflex will be to outgun his victims from the get-go. Before they attack, they will have armed themselves to the teeth. Well-organized (and/or criminal) brokers will provide more weapons on demand, for a price. Often, these brokers are the same powers authorized to regulate the weapons embargo. Meanwhile, victimized people and their legitimate governments suffer the brunt of arms embargos.
America’s ritual recollection of its trauma at Pearl Harbor has fueled a state of trigger-happy hyper-vigilance that has kept the world community on the edge of its nuclear seat for the last half century.
It is ironic to think that President Franklin Roosevelt could have known Admiral Yamamoto’s attack plan in detail, long before Battleship Row was bombed. Thousands of American casualties, hundreds of wrecked aircraft and eight obsolete battlewagons settled in the mud shallows of Oahu; these casualties would have been much less painful than the next most likely scenario.
Had the U.S. Battle Fleet toughed out the Japanese attack with fewer losses, it would have sailed off to rescue General MacArthur and his troops in the Philippines, in accordance with an Orange Plan drawn up a decade earlier by ‘battleship’ admirals. Four American aircraft carriers (conveniently absent from Pearl Harbor on December 7) along with almost every other surface combatant the Navy could muster, (their aircraft obsolete and pilots novice; their primitive radars, cranky or non-existent; and their twitchy torpedoes, useless), would have convoyed entire divisions of Regular Army troops and Marines, as well as hundreds of crated aircraft, artillery and tanks (virtually the entire trained cadre and ordnance inventory of the USA).
Somewhere in the East Pacific, beyond the range of friendly support and trapped in a spider web of fortified Japanese air bases, they would have encountered ten Japanese aircraft carriers loaded with superb aircraft and veteran pilots, twenty modernized dreadnoughts, swarms of submarines and surface escorts bristling with deadly Long Lance torpedoes.
At the time, bigot American Admirals underrated their opponent’s combat prowess. Out for blood, the Japanese would not have burdened themselves with cargo ships. Day-long aerial duels and submarine wolf pack attacks – more imbalanced in favor the Japanese than those at Midway and in the Solomon Islands, which the Americans barely won through heroic sacrifice and miraculous timing – would have alternated with slashing night surface firefights relying on Mark I eyeballs and brutal training instead of infant radar technologies, at which the Japanese routinely whipped the American Navy.
It would have been the battle of Tsushima all over again. This time, the Americans, blinded by their bigotry and lack of radar, would have succumbed to samurai sailors; instead of the Russians who lost because their stored many rounds of ready ammunition in their secondary battery casemates and turrets (to forestall a sudden Japanese torpedo boat attack), which detonated sympathetically during the first few Japanese long-range, primary gun hits.
Instead of the shallows of Oahu, America’s most vital military assets would have sunk to the bottom of some of the deepest chasms on Earth. Any survivors who fought their way through to the Philippines would merely have added to Japan’s haul of starving prisoners.
Reeling from this debacle, lacking trained cadres for its world-spanning armed forces, the USA would have taken another decade to achieve 1944 levels of combat skill. Of necessity, Americans would have ignored Europe beyond the static defense of England. Instead, it would have had to counter-attack in Hawaii, Australia, India, China and perhaps even Panama, to secure long-range bomber bases for atomic weapons. Unlike ourselves, these Americans would have desperately needed atom bombs to defeat their enemy, otherwise unstoppable.
Once again, policy makers on both sides agreed to fail at pre-war planning and negotiation; they resorted to passive-aggressive militarism instead of the active pursuit of peace—exactly the same way we are failing at it today. All sides committed these errors, rubber-stamped by a castrated League of Nations, long before the Manchurian Incident. Our United Nations can’t even claim to be marginally better.
None of today’s governments can claim world peace as its primary goal, none can claim real legitimacy or sovereignty (except at gunpoint with our reluctant consent, like during an aircraft highjack). All of them are replaceable and need to be replaced by something better.
While the first-rate powers are spellbound by the dynamics of military force, the weak are just as tempted to resort to it when the great powers forbear. High-rank fools (the 1990’s Yugoslav Aggressors, for example) have argued that restraint is a sign of weakness to be exploited in full.
This dilemma is crucial. When weapon sectarians block the path of peace, they should be disarmed using minimal force. This is more a problem of rapid police intervention than a military one carried out too late, as we are accustomed to witness. Questionable expedients may be judged legitimate: like arresting tin pot dictators in their bedclothes and slinging sleeping gas canisters down the ventilation shafts of kangaroo legislatures before they can vote for more war. We should rely on World Court juried trials, however, for final judgment as to the legitimacy of such tactics. Local moderates should be encouraged in every other way.
After making enormous sacrifices, a defeated nation may achieve strategic superiority over its former tormentor. In time, it may come to resemble its enemy in more ways than it would care to admit. Imitation is the sincerest form of self-defense. Revived losers may be tempted to challenge their old enemies in a grudge rematch. In that case, they have merely traded places; operant parameters remain the same, mirrored but otherwise undisturbed.
Another factor influences the threat deterrence formula. It is the number of person-years wasted in combat, subtracted every year from the productive pool of labor and permanently from the roster of the living. Even if humanity had expended in idleness the titanic effort and resources wasted on warfare, everyone could still earn a comfortable salary from a ten-hour workweek and a few working years of several hundred hours each. We could pursue our topics of passion (or do absolutely nothing) for the rest of our lives. We’d find ourselves a thousand times richer in any case.
Another crucial factor in the weapon formula is the political cohesion that binds a proletariat to its elite. It cannot be faked or coerced overlong. Defeat looms if the info proletariat doesn’t support its elite spontaneously. Popular discontent must remain muted.
In all but the worst-case scenarios, (see Boom! above), info elites sacrifice very little compared to the benefits they gain. They reserve for the info proletariat the privilege of sacrifice.
In the long run, public opinion should remain apathetic, even for overly long and costly wars (and what war isn’t?). As was the case during the World Wars, once elite youths get massacred as often as proletarian ones, their grieving parental decision-makers refuse to opt for peace. After all, they have already made the supreme sacrifice. They won’t give in until their host nation is stomped flat and they, flung up against a wall. We must forestall this sacrifice and turn it into a celebration shared by the same actors.
The number of well-trained warriors, times their rate of fire, divided by re-supply deadlines, times cruising and battle speeds; divided by the defender’s throw-weight, ability to dig in, armor plate, maneuver, evade detection and replace casualties; times ... These and many other constants and variables make up an intricate threat formula whose complex elements weapon managers have compulsively refined.
Col. T. N. Dupuy has attempted a definitive formulation of this equation in his book, Understanding War, Paragon House Publishers, New York, 1987. He didn’t quite succeed. His results, bearing on the Iraq War and predicting enormous American casualties at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s army, were not predictive. This formula exists; it just hasn’t been published correctly yet.
In a process strikingly similar to Darwinian selection, alternate bursts of technological innovation have favored the means of attack and defense. These and many other variables have made up a complicated threat equation. Morale, morality and cultural factors (for example, eagerness to kill despite God’s forbidding it) may be, if anything, more important than mere details of military hardware and strategy.
Several thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, perhaps the ultimate military theoretician on Earth, listed the five non-negotiable requirements for victory:
1. Politics: how the people may stand alongside their leadership, even at the risk of their lives.
2. Weather
3. Terrain
4. Commander: his particular traits.
5. Military doctrine: organization, discipline, ordnance and logistics.
Presumably, everything else, good or bad, can be endured, made up from scratch or ripped off from the enemy. This list (and his entire philosophy of military struggle) could serve the goals of World Peace just as readily.
Modern nuclear, scalar and biological attacks nullify every known form of defense. Weapon technicians have optimized this threat formula to such an extent that they have rendered it inoperable and useless. Modern armies (harmies) – with their superb warriors, exquisite weapons, and extraordinary paramilitary and paracivilian supports – run the risk of total collapse under a rain of computer, nuclear, meteorological, biological and propaganda bombardment. As a result, modern armies are less and less able to achieve satisfactory results, even while their maintenance costs spiral out of control.
The logical collapse of this value system vindicates Learners. The time-honored paraphernalia of weapon states has become obsolete. Virtually overnight, its glories, justifications and tactics have become meaningless.
If you have carefully followed this line of reasoning, you should be very frightened and excited by now. Everything we believe in has grown too toxic to swallow. It is up to us, now, to come up with better alternatives. It’s about time!
It is time we optimized the Armchair Formula at the expense of the Threat Formula. This project might seem unrealistic and even alien to your way of thinking. We cannot let that stop us. We have had so little practice at peace—unlike total war, at which we are experts. In order for peace to thrive, we will have to reclaim ancient expertise we have forgotten, retrieve it from the collective superconscience that has never forgotten anything.
Until these facts have been fully understood, weapon mentors will make use of the delusion of hypnotized masses to quash this debate. Learners won’t replace them until global majorities agree to resolve their problems in unison and in peace, despite every call for more war and less peace. In the meantime, isolated attempts at individual, institutional and mystical improvement will fail, swamped under the social contradictions that surround them.
It is our duty to defy weapon mentality in all of its incarnations. We must erase weapon mythology from our conscience, re-codify the law and struggle for a dependable peace. Let every possible sacrifice be turned into a celebration. That will get us there.
Tell yourself, “I’m ready.” Rally with your ready peers. Work together to broadcast Learners. Once enough of you have read this text, understood it and rallied around its ideas, the next steps will become obvious, each in its appropriate time and place.
I have not served as a warrior or experienced combat this time around. But I bet I have done that time during past lives and so have you. We are all subliminal veterans and victims of combat.
If you reject these writings because you refuse to believe in reincarnation or because you insist that civilians should shut up about war; too bad, so sad. Read this or refuse to, figure it out or not. All I can do is offer it up.
We must quaff deep the blood-acid vomit of war, without experiencing it first-hand, take a full breath of that flower’s rancid perfume and wipe our face in its fecal dew. We must know what we missed, the way we would recall our first sexual kiss.
Let us evoke combat from the writings of those who experienced it for us, as well as from past experience; that we may stop rehearsing it so often in present and future worlds—much less frequently than in reincarnations of the past.
I can tell you what my grandfather told me. He said the sweetest fruit he ever tasted – and we lived in Provence where fruit is good and plenty – were raw onions dug up from some forsaken farm field around Verdun; covered with dirt, those onions were, and “We ate them like apples.” The memory made him smile.
That when you’re squad gets caught in a firestorm far from shelter, it is best to fall flat in file and crawl forward until your head nuzzles under the crotch of the next man ahead, then cover his ass with your helmet. How funny he found it when one of his men crapped in his pants (as do more than one out of four combatants under fire) on the head of the fellow below. They lived through that firestorm bad enough to make one of them crap his pants, and got to laugh about it!
Or my Dad telling me about catching lice with his company under a rotting pier; or solemnly showing me a narrow cobblestone beach at the bottom of a deep-shaded gorge, too steep to climb down into blindly, though there may have been a hidden path. My father never revealed it and we never went back, even though it was quite close to home.
His best friend and a landing craft full of scouts from a tank destroyer mechanized cavalry unit were massacred by a crossfire of German machine guns probably nested on the cliff perch where we stood, a hundred feet or more (I was young, back then, and small) above the rocky beach along the coastal highway. Out on the far right flank of the American landing in Provence (Southern France), beyond which the French Naval Assault Group of Corsica got massacred. My dad was a very lucky man.
Another of his best buddies died after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He commanded the only tank platoon in that place: ten tanks flown there in pieces and him with both his arms broken and set in plaster casts, in the command tank. He died during the death march out.
Or the story my father told me once, of when he was the young officer in command of the point troop of a horse cavalry regiment marching hundreds of miles from Fort Hood, Texas to Fort Riley, Kansas and back, one of the last marches like that in American history, returning heat-drugged to post.
The lead horses of the advance guard he commanded got wind of the nearing post and charged over the crest and down into the valley below, back to their comfortable stalls and out from under the crushing sun and their dozing riders. No doubt a few of them tumbled off, though he didn’t tell me and I was too dumb to ask.
My father sent word back along the column, to wake everybody up because the horses were going to get frisky. I’ll bet they made a grand entrance on post, in fine, tight parade formation, looking smart after a masterful march. He never said; but I saw the pride in his eyes.
Both parsed their stories short and doled them out to me sparingly, though they knew I would have listened rapt for as long as they cared to speak. Such was the pain of their recollections.
Let’s put on the muddy boots of an average combat infantryman. On PeaceWorld, every child would be taught this kind of thing until it was ordinary fare—but nothing about military glory. Eight-year-olds would have taken “Combat Infantry Warrior” by dictation in school or devoured it in a comic book. Here goes…
Instead of waking up in a soft bed in a warm room down the hall from loving parents, or alongside a sweet mate bent on loving, or just alone and shiftless by yourself; you start up from the rotting litter at the bottom of some dank hole, roused by unwelcome itching and a high-explosive cacophony that has stunned your senses for months, or into an ominous quiet that portends nothing good.
The horizon rumbles with the distant grumble of heavy artillery – yours, if you’re lucky; the other side’s or both, if you’re not – it sounds surprisingly like the rumble from your empty tummy—except it is quivering the entire landscape in addition to your own guts. Hungry for more, it sifts a little more dust into your hole. Beware that it doesn’t come screaming nearby to blow you out of your hole and rip you apart for its breakfast. Nothing you could do about it.
You are horribly alone, surrounded by steaming huddles of fellow sufferers buried invisible. None of you has set aside your rotten shoes or shit-colored rags, or rested or bathed properly for a fortnight. If you slept at all, your deathlike coma was bathed in sweat, a crowded nightmare maddeningly interrupted at every moment. A zombie haze of sleep deprivation is your constant lot and that of your decision-making officers.
This black, damp morning is like every other: sweltering hot or freezing cold, depending on seasonal excess. Who would have dreamt – in the coziness of city or country homes – that mere weather could be so savage?
A fetor fills your nostrils. It is common to every battlefield: a compound of mud or dust, foul breath, body odor and human waste, moldy clothing, food and equipment, of high-explosive gasses and rotting, seared lumps of flesh of every description. For almost the last hundred years, the underlying stink has been the universal one of diesel smog. Before, it was draft animal crap on every marcher’s shoe.
Every taboo fluid and toxic effluvium that you shunned during peacetime will make up your bodybath during war. Memories of its stench and noise will fester in your psyche until you die; any hint of them during your remote civilian future will fire up fugues of post-traumatic stress.
You ache everywhere and gut-churning diarrhea trots right behind you—half from dread and its immune-suppressing pall and half from the fecal breakfast you were just lucky enough to choke down. Your muscles are saturated with acid, the milk of overwork. Your skin crawls with a maddening crawl of lice (the combatant’s constant companion), and a sticky, stinking glaze of filth. Even you and your buddies’ sweat stinks of ammonia, because your hyper-abused bodies don’t carry any more fat and burn muscle instead. You suffer from embarrassing sores and chronic complaints no one will acknowledge except with ridicule. You must cough, sneeze or shit at perilous moments and imperil your friends while doing so. You have lost more weight than would be normal or healthy. Your exhaustion would flatten you under normal circumstances; any doctor worth his salt would take one look at your sorry ass and send it home for a week’s bed rest. Not here, not now.
You are always hungry and crazed with thirst. Quarts of warm, chlorine-stinking/stinging water just nauseate you and quench nothing of your thirst. You lose your appetite the moment you open your next can of dog soldier food. For every torment spared you by the genius of your nation’s combat logistics, a dozen more plague you, worse and unfixable.
Whether you are a clinical alcoholic or not, the false promise of alcohol and drugs will make you suffer like the damned. You would do almost anything for a swig or a needle-shot of escape. Nonetheless, neither food nor drink nor drugs – those musty horrors obtainable in your pigsty – offer you any consolation.
Only the fitful mails can console you now: precious word from home. A clerk is just as likely to toss you the Dear John news that your mate went mad with loneliness and threw herself at the nearest jerk, or that your family and friends expired during the latest martial atrocity back home and abandoned you forever.
Instead of endless commutes to a moderately bearable job, you must cope with the snarling machinery of industrial hate that stretches beyond the horizon: the entire genius, fortune and flower of the youth of some random country whose citizens you never met nor held quarrel with—entirely, devoted, to, your, personal, extermination. Gulp!
Your army’s firepower is as menacing to you as the enemy’s. Front-line troops can and will be massacred by either side. Mechanized forces are hotbeds of disaster; both sides’ artillery, tanks and aircraft are perfectly designed to annihilate your transparent frailty. Disease and accidents will kill you just as dead as combat. Death is not picky on a battlefield.
Danger lurks everywhere, and quiet execution by firing squad or a leader’s pistol if you tarry too long in safety. No confidence or security awaits you, except in a tidy row of a military cemetery or convalescent ward; otherwise, in a common grave carved by bulldozer; or some dank, cry-filled and stinking aid station grotto: from first aid to last rites, by the book, with militarily efficiency.
Instead of schmoozing with familiar, competent and reasonably sane people under the constraints of civility and law, you face lost souls as filthy and miserable as your own. Instead of a coterie of friends and acquaintances nourished by mutual kindness, they are a bunch of smelly, brutish and vulgar compulsive-neurotics with whom you share nothing but misery motivated by petty spite and perfectly reasonable terror.
If you are lucky enough and possessed of worthy courage, they will treat you better than a noble brother during bright crisis, share with you their last crust of bread and sip of water, risk their lives to save yours—and treat you like dirt at any other time. Your tender feelings and battered bodies will be at each other’s mercy. No choice in the matter.
This black morning offers endless upset and anxiety to you and your prized friends. You have become sly beasts by now, as superstitious as cannibals and feral-wary of every Other.
If you find some pocket of relative security, combat may be the last of your worries. You will be bullied by rear area slave-drivers handpicked for cruelty and determined to keep you cowed: brutes you would never party with by choice or trust in combat—for endless rounds of meaningless, filthy and exhausting chores. Their only response to your demand for dignity: reflexive insult, brutality and more perilous tasks. Their relative safety dictates your peril; their meager comfort, your misery. Imps lining the entrance of Hell and goading the damned to their doom—their primary purpose is to drive you back into the firefight. Like other repressive institutions in peacetime, like cilia lining peristaltic intestines, they send wastes along their way after crushing all life from them.
Your commanders will be more intent on the enemy’s destruction than your wellbeing. If they are good guys, they will work themselves to death seeing that you are fed and housed to minimum standards. They will briefly regret your bug-like distress and extinction, then carry on. If not, they won’t give a damn; indeed, they’ll seek their promotion by promoting your distress.
This is what makes a general and earns him his stars. His primary task is to nail you and your friends to some untenable post, then send you on endless marches into greater peril until you become casualties, like so much lost luggage of no use for further trouble. There will always be more nameless replacements for him to expend. That is his duty, glory and reward.
Your best friends will die before your eyes or be horribly mangled in your arms, and their replacements and their replacements afterwards, and likely yourself in the long run. After witnessing their final agony, you will bury them in a common hole (one of hundreds you have dug) that took hours of exhaustion to scratch from the dirt, stubborn rocks and roots at your feet. The labor is staggering, involved in digging a proper grave or a decent dugout.
“The ‘million dollar’ wound (as suffered by Hollywood
heroes) is caused by a high velocity military bullet, undistorted and still
encased in its metal skin, which passes straight through relatively elastic
muscle tissue and out the other side, making a pencil-thin tunnel and leaving a
star-shaped exit wound only about three-quarters of an inch across. However, the size of the tunnel caused by the
bullet’s passage varies due to yawing.
For roughly the first 6in of its journey the fully jacketed bullet
continues point first, and this may well be enough to take it out the far side;
but because the heavier base of the bullet still wants to be at the front,
after that distance it begins to turn around or cartwheel. When this tumbling reaches 90° the bullet is
traveling sideways, thus enlarging the tunnel to more than an inch across. By the time it has traveled through tissue
for about 15in it is moving base first, and the tunnel resumes its original
width. Irrespective of the distance
traveled inside the body, however, a bullet which hits major bones may break
up; the metal jacket and soft lead core may separate into irregular pieces,
each of which travels on in unpredictable directions—as do the pieces of broken
bone. In such cases, the exit wound may
be up to 5in across. [Note: go measure
that on the skin of your torso: a bleeding wound five inches around]. Limb wounds which shatter the long bones can
cause massive damage; particularly to the legs, where splintered bones threaten
major blood vessels. Even a ‘clean’
penetration of the heart, liver of major blood vessels is usually fatal, and
brain damage normally has devastating results even when the victim survives: …
[Author’s note: bulletproof armor and modern surgical techniques
permit the survival of many wounded soldiers who used to die quick: those
struck in exposed portions of the face and neck, leading to the brain and
cervical vertebra. Another, larger group
gets concussed by explosives and suffers impairment. Thus more and more wounded veterans live out
the rest of their lives more or less vegetative and/or paralyzed. Yet another bunch of high-tech survivors lose
unarmored appendages: arms and legs, hands and feet].
“… apart from yawing and bone strikes; the amount of damage
a bullet causes depends upon another effect known as cavitation.
“Imagine a tennis ball, drilled through the center and
sliding freely long a pencil-thin rod.
The rod is the tunnel made by the bullet – the ‘permanent cavity’; the
ball is the ‘temporary cavity’ caused all around that path by a brief but
powerful shock wave following immediately behind the bullet, cavity up to 7in
across, which then collapses inwards again (the vacuum effect may also suck
dirt through the entry wound into the bullet track). Some organs, such as the liver, can rarely
survive this process; others, such as the lung, are less affected
“The crushed muscle tissue of the permanent cavity and the
stretched tissue of the temporary cavity are both, in effect, pulped, with
their blood supply through minor vessels disrupted; if left untreated the flesh
will rot (necrotize), producing an ideal breeding ground for bacteria. The surgical treatment therefore involves
debridement – the cutting away of the dead tissue and of a margin of healthy
tissue around it; this more or less radical depending upon individual
circumstances, and the correct timing and degree of debridement are matters of
professional discussion among trauma surgeons.
In the best case, new healthy tissue will grow inwards all around the
debrided wound. In the worst case,
sepsis will occur – gangrene – and the patient’s prospects become seriously
worrying.” Martin Windrow, The Last Valley:
Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam, Da Capo Press, Perseus Books Group,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004.
Originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, England, 2004,
pp. 533-534. (See also, below the next paragraph).
“No weapon frightens me as much as the shell. Bullets have certain logic. Put a sizeable enough piece of concrete
between yourself and the firer and you will be untouched. Run between cover, for it is difficult even
for an experienced shot to hit a man who sprints fast. Even when people around you are hit, the
wounds seldom seem so bad, unless the bullet has tumbled in flight or hit them
in the head. But shells? They can do things to the human body you
never believed possible; turn it inside out like a steaming rose; bend it
backwards and through itself; chop it up; shred it; pulp it: mutilations so
base and vile they never stopped revolting me.
And there is no real cover from shellfire. Shells can drop out the sky to your feet, or
smash their way through any piece of architecture to find you. Some of the ordnance the Russians were using
was slicing through ten-storey buildings before
exploding in the basement. Shells could
arrive silently and unannounced, or whistle and howl their way in, a sound that
somehow seems to tear at your nerves more than warn you of anything. It’s only the detonation which always seems
the same – a feeling as much as a sound, a hideous suck-roar-thump that in
itself, should you be close enough, can collapse your palate and liquefy your
brain.” Anthony Boyd, My War Gone
By, I Miss It So, Penguin Group, New York, London, 2001, first published by DoubleDay, New York, 1999, p. 244.
“The most clichéd but accurate metaphor for the sound of
incoming shells in flight is that of an old-fashioned steam express train
rushing past a few feet away. Depending
on their distance, speed and angle [and caliber], shells tunneling through the
air make lightly different noises; so a heavy barrage weaves itself into a
bewildering cacophony of sounds; but the rushing always ends the same way, with
a thunderclap detonation – sschhiiii… boom!
Hollywood’s microphones fail to convey either the sharpness or the
loudness of battlefield explosions; and the visual effects normally used to
simulate shellfire – with plastic bags of petrol and aluminum silicate – are
equally misleading. In reality the eye
usually registers a shell burst as an instantaneous orange-yellow flash inside
a dark, leaping fountain of mixed smoke and pulverized earth, sometimes studded
and fringed with large pieces of slower-moving debris. The bigger, heavier chunks of earth and
stones thrown up by the explosion fall nearby first; the smaller debris, blown
much higher, comes pattering and clinking down for a considerable time
afterwards and over a wider area.
“The instantaneous pressure wave from the explosion moves
outwards at supersonic speed – this is the expanding ring effect seen
fleetingly in, for example, aerial footage showing the explosions of ‘sticks’
of bombs. It is followed after a slight
but appreciable interval by a blast wind – the bulk flow of hot gases,
fragments and ground debris away from the explosion. People in the target area experience the
pressure wave as a sharp squeezing sensation in the chest, and its shock is
also felt through the ground underfoot; this shuddering of the earth is
powerful enough to make those sheltering in trenches fear (justifiably) that
they are about to be buried alive, and those who are lying flat feel themselves
being shrugged violently into the air.
These sensations are accompanied by stupefying noise, and under heavy
and persistent fire all the physical senses are overwhelmed. Completely impotent to affect their chances
of survival, soldiers find sustained shelling and mortaring the worst ordeal of
battle; those experiencing it often become temporarily unhinged, losing all
muscular control (including of the bladder and sphincter) and the capacity of
any rational thought beyond ‘Oh please God no…’
These effects are particularly marked among men exposed to shellfire for
the first time—as were the great majority at Dien Bien Phu. Although these physical and mental reactions
are quite involuntary, the fear is rational: in modern warfare it is shell and
mortar bombs that cause the great majority of casualties.
“In that minority of cases when men suffer a virtually
direct hit from artillery the result is complete destruction of the body: “The
shell hit him, I’m telling you, it blew him to tiny little bits… a booted foot,
a section of human cranium, a bunch of fingers, a bit of clothing. It was simply a matter of little, tiny bits.’ To be a witness to this utter physical
annihilation – perhaps of a friend – is particularly shocking; it abruptly
tears away a number of necessary self-protective illusions all at once. When a body has been blown up, the spinal
column – surprisingly resilient – often survives after a shell has fallen among
a group of men; counting the remaining spines is sometimes the simplest way to
determine the number of dead.
“Most injuries, however, occur further out from the site of
the explosion. Blast injuries to the
human body are categorized as primary, secondary and tertiary. The first is the direct effect of the pressure
wave; the second, the effect of projectiles and debris carried by the blast
wind; the third, the result of the body being thrown through the air and
smashing into the ground or other obstacles.
“The most obvious sign of primary injury is rupture of the
eardrums, which may occur when air pressure rises to anything between 5 and 15
pounds per square inch; war memoirs offer many instances of men killed by blast
who appear peacefully asleep apart from tell-tale bleeding from the ears. The lethal internal damage caused by
pressures of 50psi and upwards do[es]
not present dramatic outward signs (though shellfire casualties typically
suffer multiple injuries). It is the
gas-containing organs which sustain immediate and often fatal damage from the
pressure wave: the lungs and occasionally the colon suffer catastrophic injury
from the instantaneous compression effect of the blast. Large blood-filled cavities are formed in the
spongy alveoli of the lung, and fatal air embolisms are released into the
arterial system; less often, the bowels may rupture, as – in a few cases – may
the spleen and liver.
“Secondary injuries will be more obviously dramatic. When a shell bursts the steel case breaks up
into fragments of all shapes and sizes, from tiny beads to twisted chunks
weighing several pounds. These –
together with stones, pieces of weapons and equipment, and even large bone
fragments from casualties nearer the blast – whirl outwards from the center at
different speeds. The effects of being
struck by shell fragments (usually, though incorrectly called ‘shrapnel’) vary
as widely as the size and speed of the metal shards. Sometimes a man is unaware that he has been
pierced by a small splinter until somebody else points out the bloodstained
hole in his clothing. Larger fragments,
cartwheeling unevenly through the air edged with jagged blades and hooks, can
dismember and disembowel.
“In many cases the evidence confronting an eyewitness is all
too vivid. In others the immediate
reaction is one of simple puzzlement: blast and steel can play such extreme
games with the human form that the observer does not understand what he is
looking at. When some random physical
reference point suddenly jerks the whole image into a comprehensible pattern,
the shock of recognition may be appalling.
The results of massive destruction – the ruined hulk of a torso, the
crimson rack of ribs, the glistening entrails, limbs
ripped away and scattered, a severed head – have a charnel house squalor that
denies all human dignity. On chilly
evenings at Dien Bien Phu, the warm, gaping body cavities steamed visibly, and
the opened-up bowels gave off a stink of faeces.” Martin Windrow, The Last Valley, op. cit., pp.
371-374.
Or check out Southern Lebanon or Palestine within the last few years… Am I really in the 3rd millenium of the Christian Era on Planet Earth?!?
“It comes down to physics.
What movies cannot render is that, often, the most lethal aspect of an
explosion is not the scattering of projectiles in its blast, but the tremendous
shock wave that blast releases. And
whereas this shock wave rapidly weakens over the open ground of a traditional
battlefield, the canyonlike structure of a city provides both channels for it
to travel and an amplifying effect as it caroms off surrounding walls and
building. This wave, too, will gradually
weaken as it moves away from the source, but it’s exponentially more
concentrated force will inflict far greater damage. It is also likely to leave behind clearly
delineated, concentric circles of destruction.
Much like reading the growth rings of a tree, a seasoned observer examining
these circles can quite easily determine the explosion’s precise epicenter,
even if no obvious physical evidence – a crater, for example – is left behind.
“In the immediate blast area, the ground will be swept
perfectly clean. Naturally the size of
this epicenter will depend on the explosion’s magnitude – given the range of
ordnance most commonly used by modern armies, it might extend anywhere from
fifteen to eighty feet – but within this area, there will not be a scrap of
paper or a nugget of loose asphalt, and anyone unlucky enough to have been
standing there was not flung or somersaulted to their death, but vaporized: not
a tooth, not a patch of clothing or a shoelace, they have simply turned to
mist.
“Moving past the epicenter, one will begin to come across
small bits of debris, including scraps of flesh, but initially these will be so
minute and degraded as to be unrecognizable.
A little farther out and these scraps will become larger, but
distinguishing them from mere detritus will still be difficult because human
bodies break apart in unpredictable ways, and the parts here will be blackened
with scorch marks, encrusted with dirt and gravel, so as to be easy to mistake
for clumps of singed fabric or even twisted fragments of metal.
“Beyond this ring, the human remains will start to take on
recognizable form. At first, these are
likely to be mostly detached limbs and torsos, some still clothed, but most
naked or bare to their underwear, their outer garments having been shredded or
burned away in the initial blast. In
this area, there may also be a number of bodies without heads. This is because the head is the heaviest part
of the human body, as well as its most delicately attached, and in the
tremendous concussion of an artillery blast, it often severs at the top
vertebrae of the spinal column. It is
not at all uncommon in such situation to come across three or four heads lined
up against a street curb or the side of a building some distance away from the
explosion, the heads having rolled until coming to an obstacle to halt their
momentum. In this section, one will also
begin to come across the first of the survivors, most grievously wounded, and
since many of them will still be conscious and pleading for a help that is
beyond the ability of anyone to give them, it is usually this area that is the
most upsetting to the eye witness.
“At a certain point away from the epicenter – anywhere from
sixty to three hundred feet, again depending on the explosion’s magnitude – it
will appear one has reached the outer edge of destruction, but this will
probably not be true. Depending on the
trajectory of the shell and the architectural peculiarities of the city, shock
waves are likely to have traveled through the surrounding building and
alleyways, and there one is liable to find a number of more dead with no
visible wounds upon them. These will be
people who have essentially been crushed, this internal organs bursting from
the tremendous split-second force to which they were exposed, and it is not at
all abnormal to find these victims still sitting upright in chairs, as if they
are merely napping or gazing meditatively into space.
“But as ghastly as all this is, those who fall direct victim
to an artillery shell’s blast and shock wave normally represent only a portion
of those killed when a city is bombarded.
Many more are felled by glass shards from blow-out windows; these are
like thousands of jagged daggers streaking out in all direction, sometimes with
enough velocity to pierce metal or concrete or pass clean through a human
chest. Others die from having building
topple on them. And then there are the
fires which so often accompany bombardments.
While more advanced armies have developed firebombs that literally suck
the oxygen out of a targeted area, quickly exterminating all within, the more
common form of death in such circumstances is the protracted ordeal of
carbon-monoxide poisoning as the building around the victim slowly turns. And the, of course, there are those who
linger for a time, who don’t succumb to their wounds until the next day or the
one after that…” Scott Anderson, Moonlight
Hotel,
Doubleday, Random House, 2006, pp. 168-170.
Otherwise, you will have to lug their leaden, broken bodies to some uncertain fate in the rear; half-willing that they croak and relieve you of the struggle to save them. Precious friendships and loyalties long gone will twist like daggers in your heart; you will shun them eventually. No more such painful friendships for you.
The buddy you save will have been the ‘lucky’
one. More likely, everyone will have
moved out, forward or back, under orders to ignore the wounded; and your wound
will pin you to the ground until some wandering foe puts you out of your misery
with more or less sadistic flourishes or queasy hesitations, and robs your
corpse. Either you will die screaming in
agony or quietly bleed to death, all alone in good time.
Who would care about anyone but your own little, vermin-infested tribe? Everyone except your narrow squadmates – ally, foe or non-combatant – will assume the phantom shadow of inhuman wraiths whose suffering and extermination are matters of relief, indifference and derisive sport. Most of all, you will despise those pasty-faced civilians you were sent here to defend. Wishing them fates worse than your own, you will worsen their lot with the black magic of your envy.
Sooner or later, you and every survivor not a sociopath-born will turn into a post-traumatized zombie—at which point, nothing will matter until you have received months of professional help and perhaps never again, regardless. You will never fully recover.
Your only real assignment is to kill and (if possible) not be killed. You will be called upon to perform with professional expertise every crime you despise. Nothing but complete acceptance of this criminal degradation will let you escape from this hell with your body intact, though your soul may come out in tatters. Your hatred will blind you. Your enemies’ screams of agony will become music to your ears, as may the wail of hapless women and children unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. Plunder will become an indoor sport, a relief from the endless boredom of enforced hurry-up-and-wait, war’s other trademark. Any decency you once prized will be ripped from you and every perversion of justice and compassion will become routine.
It won’t be until then that you will fully understand the perversion that is war. Unfortunately, too late to do anything about it, except to compound its misery. Your options will narrow to mere survival (and perhaps not even that). Everything else will seem insignificant to you, empty words and hollow feelings compared to the black and white reality of combat and the rush of raw survival.
Stripped of the pallid grays and tittering rainbows of civilian life, you may become addicted to your dilemma and unfit to resume the trappings of peace. In that case, your beloved society, long-experienced at social triage, will quietly snuff out your existence once you return to its embrace—without pause, mercy, dignity or regret. You will not even be counted among the casualties of war, much less honored for your sacrifice. More veterans die that way, abandoned by everyone at home, than in combat.
These days, more children die from war than soldiers.
Tomorrow’s wake-up will be much like today’s, much like yesterday’s and that of the day before, unless some new disaster comes to test the limits of your courage, sanity and endurance, and likely causes you to flail, wail and perish.
Instead of manly and heroic appeals to duty, honor, country and God that you would expect to pronounce under such imaginary circumstances; your last gasped noise is likely to be little baby cries: ma, mommy, mama – that her loving kindness might spare you this agony – your last-stand plea for the comforts of the womb. All your precious manhood will leak out of you with your blood.
No one will give much of a care about your fate for very long. If you are a parent, your death will multiply the misery of your children and their mother, in addition to that beyond bearing of your parents. Those grieving your loss will shut up about it sooner or later, whether in victory or in defeat. Then they will die in their turn and your life, flushed into the void, will be completely forgotten.
Your misery will become an abstraction, less than a footnote in history books that have buried so many wasted lives in military jargon and socio-political gibberish. Less meaningful than the disappearance of a worker ant. Like a moth to the flame, your passionate, pristine existence – born and raised tenderly by devoted parents and guardians – will add its featherweight of fuel to the WeaponWorld Jive Drive and thus ensure that endless yous reincarnated in the children to come, will have to retrace your melancholy path.
Now tell me, dear Learner, how can the reassuring routines of peace and progress prepare us for this interminable agony—compared to which Christ’s afternoon Crucifixion would have been a stroll in the park? Only gradual, hypnotic conditioning from birth, paralleled by a thousand years of compulsive abuse and obsessive oppression – courtesy of weapon civilization – could prevent us from abandoning this charnel bedlam screaming our lungs out, and from defying the obvious psychopaths who would dare poke our tender extremities into their patriotic blaze like weenies crackling in a campfire.
It would be better if there were no more war on Earth, only peace. Not no combat at all, at least not for a while—but much less so, now, and less than that over time.
- Learner
PeaceWorld -
“Better yet, the most extreme measures, the bloodiest combat
tactics, the most appalling acts are kindest in the long run, for the simple
reason that they hasten the end of hostilities and thus reduce the sum of
people killed and equipment destroyed.
This point of view was defended by the famous Marshal Hindenburg when he
said: ‘The more merciless the war, the more humane in reality, since it will
end more quickly.’ This remains the
thinking of our finest strategists today.
Jean Bacon, The Greater Glory, Prism Press, San Leandro, California,
1986, p. 36 [retranslated by me].
“A soldier’s behavior must be modeled on that of a rat: kind
and understanding towards members of his own group, cruel and ferocious towards
strangers. Lose this delicate balance,
tip the scale the other way and disaster looms.
The war machine – at one time well oiled – grinds to a halt. The one word that strikes terror among
generals, spreads quietly throughout headquarters: ‘fraternization’.” Ibid.
Regardless of a modern state’s idiosyncrasies – ideological, religious and technological – its adherents obtain the most privilege by contributing to the nation’s war effort. Family wealth, seniority, dominant race and political allegiance are primary criteria for recruitment to positions of privilege and prestige. Intellect, talent and ethical judgment are at best secondary considerations.
Moral aversion to warfare is a grave liability for ambitious candidates, it guarantees their ejection from the corridors of power.
All the governments of today are masterworks of weapon mentality. The ruthlessness and ideological idiosyncrasies of national elites correspond to the vividness of the threats they feel surrounded by. The more an info proletariat can be made to fear those threats, the more tyrannical its elite may become. Its power base, impunity and malice correspond to the projection of its fears onto the proletariat.
Given current danger levels, the ever-present threat of instant bionuclear and meteorological annihilation authorizes the worst kind of weapon tyranny around the world. By gradual increments of terror, we have set ourselves up to be ruled by a succession of hyperactive Hitlers.
Every state exists because it has maximized its weapon technology. Otherwise, its neighbors would saturate it with guerrillas, invade it and replace its government with one more open to weapon mentality.
The majority of nation-states are powerful enough to deter conventional aggression; routine international relations can head off most of them. Future terrorist attacks will provoke those states just enough to aggravate their weapon tyranny.
Weapon mentality justifies its existence by erecting barriers between nation-states ruled by rival but identical elites. In a cyclic process throughout history, these barriers (or membranes) have ballooned outward. Within were the prismatic family, village, metropolis, culture, race, religious body and/or nation-state to which allegiance was owed; outside are bogeymen that may be attacked when convenient, and abused the rest of the time.
The toughest membranes and tightest prismatic groupings cluster in isolated wastelands – mountains, jungles, swamps and deserts of sand, stone and ice – remote places where sheer survival poses a major problem. The swiftest hitchhiking and the most generous hospitality can be found in the poorest countries. They are more difficult to obtain, if not entirely forbidden, where the police are vigilant, the climate mild, the cars new, and their drivers sleek and self-absorbed.
In these wastelands, any stranger could be seen as a lethal menace, yet it is here that the laws of hospitality and protection are most strictly obeyed. Once you are under their protection, their inhabitants would rather die than see you harmed. That is their law. It should be ours, also, regardless of our cushy circumstances.
Extending from prehistoric family units, these membranes have ballooned outward. Gathering different peoples into unified wholes – brutally or otherwise – they have spread out, their growth nourished by the arterial supply of growing communications systems.
Now that sub-continental populations share a common membrane, now that any two voices at opposite ends of the world are separated by .6 seconds by telephone, we are a mere quantum jump from global unity. Actually, this political process resembles the growth of one large bubble from a froth of smaller ones—and probably obeys a similar set of surface tension laws.
Federal authority demands that districts subordinate themselves to a powerful central government. In confederations, central authority exists for more restricted purposes. Confederate leaders seek the consent of diverse peoples by leaving them as undisturbed as possible.
At first, I thought Learner civilization would honor Panch Shila: five principles of confederacy articulated by Jawaharial Nehru and Chou En-lai, and ratified by their Third World supporters during the Bandung Conference of 1955.
· Non-intervention
· Mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty
· Mutual non-aggression
· Mutual aid
· Peaceful coexistence
I used to think that the World Court alone could rescind these rights and obligations, and then only temporarily, according to the verdict of randomly selected juries fully briefed by an adversarial system of international pleadings.
Since then, each of us has witnessed far too many atrocities, both foreign and domestic. Governments and their allies have indulged in them under armored shelters of non-intervention and national sovereignty. Since then, I read Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War and Peace. His much clearer analysis of the politics of PeaceWorld (published in 1943 and ignored since) includes the following directives. I quote them to you in their entirety:
“With respect to any plan proposed for maintaining ‘peace in
our time,’ the following conditions should be satisfied:
·
That they commit no political or economic
injustice, by way of inequitable distributions or unfair discriminations.
· That they contemplate no alliance which will, directly or indirectly, preserve a status quo built upon already existing injustices.
· That they use power, whether or not through the methods of coalition, to support international good faith, not to supplant it; to safeguard freedom, not to suppress it.
· That they anticipate the direction of social, economic, and political changes, so that no measures positively taken will operate as impediments to progress anywhere in the world, and so that some positive measures be taken to facilitate it.
· That they permit, encourage, and even perhaps institute international agencies, such as the League of Nations and the World Court, not because such institutions can by themselves postpone the next war, much less perpetuate peace, but because such institutions provide men with the image of an international community, and with the political experience needed for the formations of the future.
· That they multiply such agencies and the International Labor Office, which deal with problems common to all nations from the point of view of a common good that transcends national interests; and, in this connection, that they create an International Office of Education for the purpose of equalizing educational opportunity throughout the world at the highest level [author’s note: which is Learners’ primary intent], and to guide education everywhere in the training of citizens.” pp. 290-291.
Along with the technical means to exterminate a certain population comes the ability to administer it in peace. The Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) extended only as far as Roman Legions could troop their Eagles. Just as everyone on Earth could be exterminated within a few weeks; we could also extend dependable abundance and justice to the same number of people.
Only battle elites thrive in a fractured society.
Imagine that you were visiting a booming Renaissance port. Its inhabitants have surplus capital, ships, goods and luxury orders they could only fill abroad. However, a stable government must guarantee the investors’ stake in foreign trade. Their profit margins must remain reasonably secure despite long periods spent in idle apprehension, awaiting their cargos’ return. If random gangs of armed hooligans can gain control the docks and commandeer any freight and passengers passing across them, no merchant would gamble his savings on such a risky business.
Everyone on Earth faces the same predicament. The United Nations recognize the sovereignty of about two hundred convoluted street gangs, each entitled to hold its citizens hostage at knifepoint and attack any other gang it can get away with. It doesn’t even necessarily need that excuse.
Meanwhile, at least five thousand nations – finalists of ten thousand or more that ceased registering in what is left of recorded history – compete for those two hundred certificates of sovereignty. No wonder the world is filled with so many guerillas and terrorists!
Like any other polis (police, “citadel”, city-state), the Earth needs the equivalent of one City Hall, one Justice of the Peace and one duly appointed Police Force. Not two hundred glorified street gangs disguised as Prism governments; not a combination of 180-odd recognized governments and the best-organized criminal/corporate gangs competing with them for military/economic power. And certainly not the worst Wimp gang whipping all the others in protracted rumbles until it, too, collapses from its internal contradictions.
“In a dark period of five hundred years, Rome was
perpetually afflicted by the sanguinary quarrels of the nobles and the people,
the Guelphs and Ghibelines, [author’s note: pro-pope and imperialist,
respectively], the Colonna and Ursini: and if much
has escaped the knowledge, and much is unworthy of the notice of history, I
have exposed in the two preceding chapters, the cause and effects of the public
disorders. At such a time, when every
quarrel was decided by the sword; and none could trust their lives or
properties to the impotence of law; the powerful citizens were armed for safety
or offense against domestic enemies whom they feared or hated. Except Venice alone, the same dangers and
designs were common to all the free republics of Italy; and the nobles usurped
the prerogative of fortifying their houses, and erecting strong towers that
were capable of resisting a sudden attack.
…
“… Whatever is
fortified will be attacked, and whatever is attacked may be destroyed … ‘The
houses,’ says a cardinal and poet of the times, ‘were crushed by the weight and
velocity of enormous stones; the walls were perforated by the strokes of the
battering-ram; the towers were involved in fire and smoke; and the assailants
were stimulated by rapine and revenge.’
The work was consummated by the tyranny of the laws; and the factions of
Italy alternately exercised a blind and thoughtless vengeance on their
adversaries, whose houses and castles they razed to the ground. In comparing the days of foreign, with the
ages of domestic hostility, we must pronounce that the latter have been far
more ruinous to the city, and our opinion is confirmed by the evidence of
Petrarch. ‘Behold,’ says the laureate,
‘the relics of Rome, the image of her pristine greatness! Neither time nor the Barbarian can boast the
merit of this stupendous destruction: it was perpetrated by her own citizens,
by the most illustrious of her sons; and your ancestors (he writes to a noble
Anibaldi) have done with the battering-ram, what the Punic hero could not
accomplish with the sword.’” Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Allen Lane Ltd., the Penguin Press,
London, 1994, p. 1073-5.
Every nation and ethnic group should be permitted to reclaim its political independence and sovereignty through legal means and without war. That way, they would stop breeding hot spots of intractable military friction: Tamils, American Indians by tribe, Karins, Kashmiris, Kurds, Palestinians ... a list that gets real long real fast. This option is closed to us today because criminal activities are certified legitimate once they’ve grown huge and profitable enough for a few.
Thus modern states may kidnap, torture, loot local resources and economies, starve and exterminate minorities, wage guerilla war against them, raise more murderous terrorists every generation simply by terrorizing their families—and no one in the world community so much as sneezes.
You! Do you imagine your rights are secure as long as some tyrant may play games like these with other people’s indignation? You are next, poor dummy.
Here is the main question of politics: whom to trust?
The People? Can we arm them, give them sovereign political rights, access to all the information they need and freedom to do their best in total peace? The United States’ Constitution is founded on that trust: the wellspring of its greatness. Our crooked leaders are shifting more and more resources to the weapons alternative, as follows.
We can mistrust the People and entrust some elite minority instead (an information elite). It should remain disinterested, artificially hyper-educated, supremely class-conscious and well adapted to run a military dictatorship whenever it feels the need and can justify it with enough war propaganda. Without finding anything wrong in that.
Then they will have to arm some minority police or paramilitary (a battle elite) to enforce their illegitimate leadership. Thereafter, we can ruin ourselves by paying them more than generously so that they will wreck as little damage as possible; or let them run riot on the cheap, destroy society and the environment for short-term profit.
In either case, the nastier the battle elite, the safer the information elite feels -- even though reality dictates exactly the opposite: less aggression, more security.
Then we can pray that Mafia thugs don’t take over and replace those same elites. That takeover is a Darwinian certainty and has already happened, in case you hadn’t figured it out yet.
The People or the Mafia? You choose.
Military and criminal organizations share intimate and subtle co-dependencies.
An illustrative military/criminal order is the Hashashin of ancient Syria. Their rest, recreation and training zones were located in remote mountains where the lavish abuse of drugs and young women persuaded novice assassins that they could live in earthly paradise while they served the Hashashin, and go directly to heaven by dying in their service. Meanwhile, their leaders graduated through laborious steps of mystery and initiation, into the central, revealed Truth of the Cult. “This whole thing is nothing but a patchwork of lies and power hunger: enjoy.”
Today, generic death squads fester across the planet. Usually, they serve as Gestapo-like security thugs and/or revolutionary enforcers. Similar organizations clutter the history books: the military religious orders, (Buddhist martial monasteries compacted like bonsai plants into criminal clans by government suppression; knights Templar, Hospitalier and Teutonic); Westphalian Vehmgericht (vehmic courts of medieval Germany); Japanese Ninja; Indian Thugees; KKK lynch mobs; Hermandad of Spain and Acordada of Mexico; and highland Scots, Colombian and Afghan tribal clans, among others.
Also, various secret animal clans: Werewolves in Germania and Scandinavia, African Lion and Leopard societies, and Asian Tiger equivalents. Since the summary execution of social deviants became less and less acceptable to local communities, these clans evolved to permit it. Victims of execution would be found torn to shreds, the tracks of big predators all around their bodies – torn apart by iron claws, the tracks made by craftily carved sandal heels. No one knew whether it was a predator that had claimed another victim, or the most dangerous predator of all: man.
Nowadays, “right-wing death squad member” is a routine job description in many countries, entitlement to earn one’s keep—not a term of loathing and ostracism. If you know people who know the right people, you can get someone bumped off, for the price of a few drug fixes or a trendy pair of tennis shoes. Such nations disgrace themselves.
Criminals mirror militarists. Both sides share the same battle elite penchant for murder. You will find similar traits in all three camps: expertise at violence, risk-taking, clannishness, rituals of dominance and submission, fiercely contested chains of command, the demand for perfect obedience, power grabs by force and cunning, contempt for outsiders, fondness for deceit, and a compulsion to foment pain, torment and terror―preferably on defenseless innocents.
Once warfare breaks out, prisons, jails and crime syndicates erupt into the Army. In peacetime, criminal courts often force wayward teenagers to choose between jail and the military. Several murderers-for-hire solicited new customers through Soldier of Fortune magazine.
Another weapon brotherhood goes unrecognized: that between criminals and the police. Snitches and petty larcenists in Victorian Era capitals were the first recruits into the police forces of Europe. The information elite’s reasoning went thus:
· the best hunter of a criminal must be another criminal; and
· why not hire the smarter half of the worst aggressors, track them with vigorous oversight and call them “police”—rather than attempt to suppress both sets of scoundrels with another, less-qualified force?
Interpol, Europe’s central police agency, was founded on Gestapo files and informant networks. It is worth noting that the first functional agency of the European Economic Community was the last one of Nazi-dominated Europe: its police force… Just like the last gasp of the dying Roman Empire was its body of laws.
Quite recently, Interpol officially purged itself of the worst aspects of its Nazi contamination. Unlike the American government, which neither admitted nor retracted its post-war fondness for fascist operatives and their dirty tricks… up to and including the unpunished assassination of John F. Kennedy, a standing President of the United States.
In a real democracy, this crime alone would have set off a catastrophic civil war until every elite conspirator had been dragged into the light of day and publicly condemned. The American leadership lied, executed who knows how many honest witnesses, and protected the bastards responsible, to avert this catastrophe.
According to current weapon thought, new production efficiencies will deprive enormous civilian labor pools of employment and legitimate income, as those necessities are misunderstood today. Rather than install Learner Networks to generate new livelihoods for these people, reactionaries are organizing massive trivia-criminalization and prison-building programs. There are way too many prisoners in the USA alone (one percent of the population and still growing). Too many more people are required to hunt, process and guard them. Stalin would have been proud of the triumph of his ideological successors. These stupid substitutes for gainful employment typify weapon management.
No army, criminal syndicate or police force, no matter how brutal and well equipped, can enforce obedience that exceeds local majorities’ willingness to impose it upon themselves. Without a corresponding Learner transformation, revaluing the common currency of public responsibility is an exercise in futility. It is a waste of time—be it at gunpoint or using non-lethal weaponry and mass propaganda. Getting the police to suppress legitimate dissent through sheer personnel and firepower supplements (by multiplying trivial arrests and stepping up illegal surveillance) just induces more sophisticated corruption and more victims among the innocent.
The most effective police departments are peace instruments. They are totally unlike secret police, intelligence agencies and armies. Those are weapon technologies. Well-run police use minimal force to suppress violence. In order to operate effectively, they must be backed by efficient social service agencies. Ideally, they submit to an honest and wary judiciary controlled by juries through tiers of public review and private appeal. At best, the police should be recruited from an ethnic mix similar to the population they are patrolling, and live in the same neighborhoods they are assigned to patrol.
Civic problems should be handled by social, legislative, voluntary and entrepreneurial interventions—not just pummeled by brute force. If legitimate grievances generate mass demonstrations, they must be dealt with constructively. New channels of communication need to be opened on the basis of their legitimacy.
On the other hand, armies are trained, organized, and equipped to inflict the utmost damage and mayhem in the shortest possible time—this regardless of rights and wrongs. Ordering the military to use discrete increments of force – to provide disaster relief and social assistance in civilian settings, for example, or impose non-violence on antagonists who reject cease-fires – betrays a complete misunderstanding of weapon management.
Every time info elites confuse police and military functions, every time they attempt to merge police and military functions into an armed bureaucracy, they abuse their proletarian hosts through overzealous brutality and/or bungling neglect.
Go take a look at Iraq from 2003 to 2011: our common model of WeaponWorld things to come. Faluja = your hometown. Does that turn you on?
As the quality of life deteriorates, criminal punishment loses its effectiveness. When the quality of life improves, especially among the poor, criminal deterrence recovers.
The least stupid criminals find that they have too much to lose – and too many good alternatives to pick from – to settle for mere criminality. Once they opt for the straight and narrow, they turn into allies of the forces of order, or at least benevolent neutrals.
Once punishments are reduced, the following results can be expected. Far fewer, less competent criminals confront law-abiding majorities and their natural allies: a more-or-less honest police force and a jury-controlled judiciary.
Otherwise, so-called criminals are just disguised guerrillas: fish in a sea of cooperative victims. The populace and its criminal minority become reluctant allies standing should-to-shoulder against their ‘anti-crime, law-and-order’ oppressors. This is the optimal recruitment ground for battle elites and the preferred outcome of weapon management.
In weapon states, an active conscience is for slaves, old veterans nursing nasty dreams, and rapt infants listening to bloody fairy tales. Weapon mentality makes the rest of us betray our conscience on command. It teaches us to tolerate the intolerable—much the way the Nazis taught Europeans to ignore the Holocaust, at gunpoint.
What we laughingly call 'modern culture' is our pathetic attempt to justify this massive aberration of values. By what right or duty do we shore up this travesty?
Let’s switch over to something healthier!
Any self-respecting capitalist would ask for nothing better than to run his most profitable version of the Rolls Royce Company. If he had any sense at all (and he didn’t achieve his position by being stupid), he would rather offer the highest quality product or service at the best price the market could bear. That would include the best benefits package for his elite workers and their families, superb educational facilities, healthy communities with low crime, and low prices for survival necessities. All the benefits Learners would seek, this wise capitalist would adopt for his workers and consumers in order to make the best product and the maximum profit.
Despite his desire to excel in this manner, he must take into account weapon taxation. Either the quality of his product must suffer or he must find some other way to short-change his customers and workers, so as to defray mandatory weapon taxation that offers him no economic gain. The greater the value of his product and the higher his profits, the more war taxes he will be expected to pay and the more they will distort his cost-benefit analysis. He will be forced to reduce the quality of his product and use the savings to defray his weapons expenses. His employees, clients and competitors will have to do likewise, in direct proportion to their success.
This distortion is inevitable in every so-called free-market enterprise.
It is only on PeaceWorld that this
self-respecting capitalist could satisfy his topic
of passion and build the Rolls Royce
Company of his dreams. It is only there
that cost-cutting would be business suicide if it reduced the quality of his
product or service. The race would go to
the highest quality manufacturer or service provider, not to the lowest cost
cutter at the expense of quality. On
WeaponWorld, he would betray his topic of passion—as we must, our own.
There is nothing wrong with Capitalism, per se.
However, it can adopt one of two forms of growth. Once it shifts from one to the other, it poisons any society that tolerates its presence, much less its control.
The first form of capitalist growth could be called the Garden. In it, the resources of Capital are invested in areas lacking those resources to begin with. A passionate gardener cultivates the soil, supplements its nutrients and waters it as required. He or she plants trees, shrubs and flowering plants to suit his taste; rips out weeds and unwanted plants, and leaves a clear field for the growth of favored ones. This is the work of capital at its best: superior to any other method of economic growth.
In the second form, the gardeners walk away or are otherwise indisposed. They no longer tend their garden, and weeds proliferate. Weeds can be seen as the second wave of capitalism. All the nutrients, soil and water carefully gathered to further the growth of beneficial plants is sucked up by the other kind. They smother the old growth and propagate themselves with sole goal of self-propagation. Everything else suffers while they thrive.
This process cannot be reversed except with tremendous labor and care. As time goes on, the garden will require more and more labor merely to keep it weeded, fertilized and watered, for very little additional return. After all, a garden is a garden: no more and no less.
Another analogy would be between healthy cells of a growing body and the viruses attacking it. The first form of capitalism would consist of the body’s careful regulation of clean water and nutrients to nourish its cells and allow them to grow, whereas the second would consist of an invasive virus whose sole intent was its replication at the expense of the host. It would take over every cell it found, convert that cell’s growth machinery to produce new viruses, then explode the invaded and starved cell to release its virus load among the remaining cells of the body, and so on. That would illustrate the second form of capitalism.
Nowadays, the richest, most powerful and influential capitalists have learned that viral or weed growth is much more profitable in the short term, than that of the garden or the body. They have abandoned long-term growth in favor of the weed variety: more profitable in the short run but ruinous in the long. What’s more, they are more and more intoxicated by this form of growth, at the expense of the earlier kind.
Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2007, describes this transition quite clearly. She reviews a succession of synthetic and/or natural disasters followed by tyrannical takeovers that allowed international financiers to cannibalize the economy of entire nations.
According to the Chicago School of Economics, proclaimed by Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and other fanatics of so-called “laissez-faire Capitalism,” a psychological and philosophical analogy could be drawn, between the annihilation of a psyche considered pathological by means of electroshock and crushing doses of drugs (even though those treatments never worked), and the annihilation of a people’s will considered too progressive, by means of natural catastrophe, a newly installed tyranny or both in succession.
“Loyola’s new style of obedience was induced by rigorous
training, which began with a two-year novitiate. One year would have been normal. The purpose of these twenty-four months was
to dismantle a young man’s will into its component parts in order to isolate
within those parts anything undesirable.
The idea was not to change the man’s ideas or beliefs but simply to eliminate
the troublesome elements. The training
then went on to purify what was adaptable and useful and to cement it all back
together with the structure of the [Jesuit] Society.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The
Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House,
1991, p. 113.
In carrying out this philosophy, Chicago School economists took the first opportunity (and every one thereafter) to silence the voice of the People. Once they had succeeded, they could strip out public services, savings accounts and retirement funds; multiply unemployment dramatically by ruining local commerce and dismantling factories; and burden the People with enormous loads of debt, so that it could never regain its original vigor and promise, won so painfully in the recent past―all to the profit of these economists’ high-finance bosses.
From Iran and South America in the 1970’s, through Poland and Russia in the 80’s, the Asian Tigers in the 90’s, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the annihilation of Iraq, followed by the massive bankster and financial industry bailouts of today; each new disaster brought greater profits to their coffers over shorter and shorter intervals of time, with less and less effort on their part.
All they had to do was silence anyone who intended to benefit the People and enforce the Law; something they could accomplish by paying off the worst local white-collar criminals to do their bidding, backed by well-funded military to come down hard on the remaining dissidents. This combination required a small fraction of their funds to finance and brought them enormous returns.
Naomi Klein’s image of an alternative to this kind of Capital can be found at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-take/.
Actually, this pattern can be traced to the inception of Capitalism and even further back, to the origin of mass societies. Each of them grew up by enslaving as many individuals on the periphery as they could get away with, by destroying other societies and looting them, and by exterminating “primitive” societies that stood in the way. Nothing new there.
The best example I can find in history is that of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame, or the Conqueror, 1336-1405). He built up his capital city, Samarqand, into one of the wonders of the world, decked it with vast riches, magnificent parks and monumental architecture; he filled his court with musicians, artists, scholars and pious men. He did so by turning every other city on the Silk Road into a pile of ashes and a pyramid of rotting skulls. Needless to say, the commercial network of the Silk Road withered along with his capital city after his death, since there were no way-stations left to accommodate itinerant merchants. Even centuries later, even today, the Silk Road has never fully recovered.
Too bad: those who were once Gardening Capitalists are now permanent addicts of the Weed variety. Each new disaster they engineer must be more traumatic and destructive of a nation’s collective psyche (and now the whole world’s), for them to get away with it and profit in proportion to the amount of damage they inflict.
Marx deplored the fact that capital will inevitably run out of worthy targets for investment. As societies mature, the margin of growth of various commercial enterprises become smaller and smaller, as they compete with equivalents of equal value and output. In the long run, Capitalism’s only alternative is to destroy more or less completely any rival entity and then invest in whatever is left. This is the only way it has found to maintain its margin of profit over time.
Given an economically closed (globalized) planet in which commerce and industry have been just about equalized everywhere, there is nowhere left for Capital to invest and expect historic rates of return superior to those of the past. Only by systematically smashing various economies in turn, then investing in the ruins, can Capital maintain its historic profitability.
This can be seen as a kind of slash-and-burn agriculture, where farmers burn down parcels of lush forest and cultivate crops in the ashes. Once the ground loses the fertility it picked up through that burning, they move on to the next plot to burn.
As long as they are not too numerous and as long as great forests grow back and fill in the blank spaces, this form of cultivation works quite well. However, once the farmers grow too numerous and the forest shrinks proportionately, that becomes a formula for desert waste and starvation among the people.
Having spent the last few centuries (long before the World Wars) suffering from the slash-and-burn habits of Capitalist investors, the Earth has reached the point where what is left after each of their ‘bigger and better’ forest fires, has lost its ability to provide compensatory growth. We have reached a stage where the world economy resembles a desert waste in that place where a thriving forest once stood. As a perfect illustration and warning, the natural world has reached a similar state of decay and that we are running out of petroleum and mineral resources.
As raw materials grow more expensive to extract and process, the only economic basis left to draw upon will be the basic sustenance of world populations. The prevalent example is the conversion of food crops into biofuel. As this sustenance is stolen and adulterated in greater and greater volume to satisfy the demands of Capital, and as those profits are shifted to a smaller and smaller clique of billionaires and their direct beneficiaries, the People will rise up to oppose this theft by force of arms. Since weapons have become so deadly, that fight will just aggravate the problem, destroying many more resources, infrastructures and lives than would be nurtured and/or grown back in the process.
Essentially, the only place left for Capital to invest in is outer space. Earth must be seen as homeground which may no longer suffer the destruction and exploitation that Capital requires. Its governors must treat Capitalists who attempt to maximize their profits at the expense of the People, any people, as enemies of mankind who must be ruthlessly criminalized and regulated into more civilized behavior.
The world economy is not quite ready to exploit outer space and its virtually unlimited resources. That project will require a few decades of intensive development of mankind’s basic needs. Only then will sufficient intellectual and infrastructure resources be available to take on this task. In the meantime, any reduction of them for short-term profit must be criminalized, and capitalist financiers must be regulated to within an inch of their financial lives.
This will be a very difficult task, since Capital can call on almost unlimited cash to hire criminals and con-men (disguised as politicians, the military, the press and other social agency leaders) to do their dirty work. It will require a combination of fanatical devotion and revolutionary purity on the part of world leaders, plus an information network of certified purity. The only framework within which such people and things could grow, would be PeaceWorld. Any other would offer trivial returns in exchange for the self-sacrifice and devotion required.
Since this policy will be very painful for Capitalists, dragging them to the edge of bankruptcy and economic suicide, they will be the only ones qualified to determine how rigorously we may apply it without killing the Golden Goose, to the microscopic limit of their tolerance.
I call on Capitalists themselves to recognize the corner into which they have painted us. They must understand, with an awareness deeper than greed, what is at stake for themselves, for their dependents and for the rest of humanity. It is they and they alone who may form the world leadership required for this undertaking; only they can regulate themselves and check the worst among them and their slimiest deeds.
Short of this transformation, the world is doomed to spin out of control at the hands of its most sociopathic profiteers. The toll of murder and destruction would stagger the imagination and probably not be survivable by civilization.
Those are the choices we face: we, the People and those extraordinary ones who play with Capital.
“And perhaps a great day will come when a people
distinguished by war and victory, by the highest development of its military
organization and intelligence, and accustomed to making the gravest sacrifices
to these things, will choose to exclaim, “We will break the sword into pieces!”—and will demolish its entire military machine down to its
deepest foundations. To disarm while
being the best armed, as an expression of elevated feelings—that is the means
to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition toward peace: whereas
so-called “armed peace” such as that which parades in every country nowadays,
is a disposition toward hostility that trusts neither itself nor its neighbor
and, partly out of hatred, partly out of fear, refuses to put down its weapons.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (my edits) http://bartleby.com/66/83/42183.html
The United States is so dualistic, it must have a rising sign in Gemini. It is at once lenient and oppressive, utilitarian and mythic, genuine and fraudulent, placid yet deeply disturbed, egalitarian and hierarchical, peace loving and jingo, brilliant yet desperately blah.
This may have a lot to do with the contrast Professor Allen C. Guelzo notes during his lecture series, ‘The American Mind,’ available on CD through the Teaching Company at http://www.teach12.com. According to him, Americans are sundered between reason and will, intellect and action.
Which habit is more worrisome to you: failing to act in time or failing to think through the consequences of your action? Are you more afraid of analysis paralysis than of the unintended consequences of your behavior?
Your response will pigeonhole you into one of two categories of Americans. On the one hand, people like George W. Bush and his cronies who rush in where angels fear to tread, based on faith, gut instinct, dogma, pure greed or some other BS; and their mirror-images, so-called “peace and progress activists” who haven’t a clue what they are doing and could care less about their to-date permanent state of failure. On the other hand, people like John Kerry, Bill Clinton and their supporters who never met an idea they couldn’t dissect from now ‘til Sunday, without doing anything much in the meantime; and people like me and fellow ideologists stuck in our own brown studies.
Each group resents the intrusion and failure of the other; each wishes it could monopolize political and economic power. The political balance between these two tendencies must be meticulously maintained; pre-emption by one or the other has proven disastrous in the past and could be fatal in the future.
America is in a state of perpetual self-contradiction. Change and tradition are equally valued here; the best and worst of art and good taste are produced in vast quantities, prized dearly and then cast out as rubbish. America’s fruitful plains of bear the fairest harvests on Earth, bar none. Yet both at home and abroad, we strip-mine the soil, poison crops, deplete fisheries, abuse farm animals and ruin family farmers. As a result, much of this bounty gets over-processed into a noxious sludge fit only to grow obese on, burn, and encrust the land with layers of solid, liquid and gaseous filth.
If you stroll across an urban landscape in America, it is like walking across the bottom of a gigantic, almost empty garbage dumpster: depressing litter everywhere.
American law simulates justice in sporadic fits, depending on the wealth and notoriety of the accused. Equity under strong courts is the letter of the law; self-promotion through vicious competition is its spirit. When a poor guy is swept into the Prison Empire run for profit by reactionaries, he is dropped into Hell on Earth, regardless of his real guilt or innocence. Judgeships offer many lofty sinecures for stealth reactionaries and monstrous control freaks, and a few humble watchposts for brilliant legal minds—at least at junior levels where the ever-reactionary Congress cannot meddle.
When the Twin Towers fell in what was obviously a controlled demolition (no building that tall would collapse by accident on its own footprint―anyone who says so is a damned liar and a fool to take me for a fool), the first thing Congress made sure of was that families of high-income victims would get higher compensation. I cannot find a better illustration of what has become routine Congressional slime; there are many more. For example, why didn’t it investigate who controlled that demolition, much less the obvious?
Many green shoots of idealism spring up, here and there, across an intellectual wasteland of hypocrisy, greed and closed mindedness. Americans have defended freedom and slavery, liberty and tyranny with equal sincerity and ferocity. In America, progressives maintain the illusion of harmony with conservatives, and liberals with reactionaries, by agreeing to disagree about democracy’s fundamental definition.
Orthodox politicians and media pundits maintain that 'representative democracy' and the vote are sacred. Yet ballots are miscounted by the millions, especially in the Dixiecrat South. Recent voting scandals in Florida and Ohio are just the tip of an iceberg of Southern crypto-racism that diffuses its chill up North.
No one seems to care that American voters constitute an Athenian minority surrounded by a majority of idiot slaves, or that no Greek tyranny was run by such an anti-democratic minority as our corporate slave masters and their thought-police.
As long as Learner topics of passion are not given priority in public discussion, the pool of leadership talent must shrink, decision-makers get dumber, and unintended consequences become more disastrous. Simple arithmetic.
After throwing back a few British assaults, America’s European colonists concluded that they were invulnerable to foreign invasion behind their oceanic moats. Blessed with vast virgin lands to exploit, they invited mass immigration that other, more crowded nations had to resist. Our real-life freedoms and opportunities surpassed everyone else’s dreams.
With the exception, of course, of dispossessed American Indians, and of Blacks abducted from their African homeland. Both sets of victims – numbering in the millions – were denied the right every American citizen values most: free welcome into fellow citizenship. A welcome everyone on Earth deserves; the same welcome that held the Roman Empire together, wherever its citizens came from—at least until born-again Huns took over and wrecked everything.
Can’t you see the same thing happening here and now? Shall we sit still for this Vandal scandal like lead-dummied Romans, or resist it with all our might? True, our poisons are more toxic and widespread. Will we prove strong and smart enough to overcome them?
Thus, American business, art and science – even organized religion – benefited from massive peace inputs. Nonetheless, without really knowing why, Americans nursed racial bigotry, mass poverty, ethnic genocide, slavery and civil war. The main reason they subsidized weapon mentality in blatant defiance of the Constitution, was to retain a razor-sharp weapon technology against outsiders. This in keeping with the Old World tradition of instant cutthroat by government command.
The proliferation of biological, scalar and nuclear weapons confounds America’s moat defense. Thus is fading our sense of strategic invulnerability along with collateral prosperity and freedom.
From the Korean War to those in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, each became more expensive, unjustifiable, corrupting and harmful to our best institutions. Since such military adventures had to end in failure and disgrace, American reactionaries made their way home to start hunting among their own people for their next prey. Indigents, immigrants, minorities, children, drug users, victimless criminals, the homeless, mental patients, natural ecosystems—anyone and anything that seemed vulnerable enough.
Remember, rising dread of outside threat multiplies homegrown reaction and poverty, as each weapons elite pledges to protect its info proletariat from elites abroad (apparently horrid but actually identical).
Radicals and reactionaries misbehave with boring predictability. Regardless of their origin, ideology, race and other cosmetic distinctions, they believe their society won't cohere unless it confronts a horde of potential enemies. Internal or external, make-believe or real, it matters little who those Others really are.
To leftists, the ultimate foes are the rich. Centrists’ favorite bogeymen are surly foreign powers and crafty criminals. Reactionaries define the enemy as anyone weak enough (in control of few votes and little wealth). All three of them esteem brutality as a cure-all.
These enemies often turn out to be illusory. When real threats emerge, they tend do so from out of the blue. Many aggressors, (Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, Osama bin Laden, for example), were funded by the same authorities hired to keep an eye on them.
When projected threats turn out to be significant and trigger vigorous defensive measures set in place to checkmate them, jingo politicians plug their ears to warnings of impending disaster and let it happen anyway, seemingly through sheer incompetence. In fact, they go to great lengths to provoke the violent reaction their plans require.
In one sense, America has come to the end of its era of strategic immunity based on oceanic moats. According to our praetorians, we must adopt permanent weapon mentality – even in times of peace – and accept its overheads. Otherwise, we risk being relegated to second-class status. My question is: second-class to whom?
When the United States sneezes, the other powers get pneumonia. During the 1970’s, the OPEC nations reversed their oil embargo; not because their chokehold had crippled the Great Satan, but because it was throttling the golden goose. They realized, a little late, that the real victims of their petroleum price hikes turned out to be among the poorest of their allies and trading partners.
Rising crime and unemployment statistics enumerate the raw deal of American weapon tyranny. These nightmare sums are nothing compared to the hell we may expect if we let smooth-talking Wimps and Prisms con us into Armageddon.
Just as peace management would seek to make life as productive and rewarding as possible, weapon management longs for inequalities of wealth, creativity and security. Life must become so uncertain that military enlistment seems like a boon for many poor children. Weapon mentality creates a vast labor pool of human drones: willing codependents of repression, warfare and criminality.
Remember, every suppressed demonstration, illegal arrest, unresolved act of police brutality, and Banana Republican croaking “More repression!” reveals a panicked elite lashing out against political nightmares more frightful to it than any real mob or insurrection.
Conservatives share a common weakness. They may sustain old values, but cannot nurture new ones. Faithful to weapon mentality, they lack peace mentality’s creative spark.
It took three hundred years, from the 1200's on, for European conservatives to adopt the zero in arithmetic.
Progressives cannot propose a new approach to abundance without conservatives resisting “to (someone else’s) death” beforehand. Conservatives cannot make themselves believe that everyone would be better off once wealth were shared more evenly; they refuse to picture the wealth they might achieve by unrestrained sharing. So they feel compelled to misappropriate wealth and creativity on a zero-sum basis. “What I gain, you must lose.”
This despite history’s most persistent lesson: societies remain poor insofar some minority misappropriates wealth. The smaller, in proportion, this wealthy minority remains, the more restricted and thus stupid its decision-making, the simpler its social structure and the poorer the host nation.
The genetic heritage of a restrictive elite must also suffer. Its children, genetically weaker than sturdier crossbreeds, will suffer higher infant mortality in direct proportion to this restriction of worthy mates. A closed elite may eliminate itself entirely in this manner, during the next stretch of heightened infant mortality.
Ancient wealth trickled like a mountain rivulet, from one god-king to his tiny court hermetically sealed from the unwashed masses. It bubbled along creek-beds of medieval nobility and priesthood, carefully diked off from their inferiors. It then streamed between the Victorian upper-bourgeoisie, clerics and general staff. These worthies held the masses at bayonet-point outside the magic circle of wealth.
Today, this wealth meanders along tributaries of professionals and officers/bureaucrats. They try to buy off the underclass at minimal expense, with (factory-farmed, burger-bun) bread and circus (television). Before long, all the wealth on Earth will flow into the most deserving of seas, that of every Learner worldwide. At each stage of redistribution, as if by magic, everyone’s wealth increases exponentially.
Reactionaries can whine all they want; they can kill, torture, lie and steal as much as their cowardly panic allows. They will be the poorer for it and will never escape this inevitable conclusion of history. If they acted a little bit more wisely, they would profit exponentially once and for all.
Natural disasters and warfare weaken peace management. Social harmony is a delicate fabric woven from many strands of mutual trust, cooperation and good will. This web is fragile; it frays under stress and soon parts. During disasters, the distribution of necessities breaks down. That incites people to looting, personal vengeance and other forms of lawlessness. “Civilization is just a question of fodder,” Berthold Brecht. Facing unaccustomed overloads, routine protocols become sporadic, unfair and inadequate; rigidity, uncertainty and centralization set in. Opportunistic Conspirators of Greed proliferate, as does the synergy of their ill effects. Tyranny re-asserts itself as peace technologies whither. As the situation worsens, traumatized societies shift from marginal peace to climax weapon production—voila (vwahlah! “Here is”) true war fever.
An intermittent pandemic appears to afflict entire societies. While majorities sink into economic and spiritual decline, a dwindling minority amasses undeserved riches. Traditional values and sources of security are uprooted until combat itself begins to look promising.
This pandemic of social degeneracy was most apparent during the Great Depression. The carnage of World War I may have converted most info proletarians into ardent pacifists, but it converted key elites into fanatical weapon sectarians who made sure the Great Depression would so pummel info proletarian sensibilities that World War II came as a relief.
The best military recruit is a slum child. This Golden Rule of weapon mentality applies just as much to bitter ghetto sociopaths as to the sweet majority of street urchins. The lucky ones survive their inevitable abuse. Their parents and guardians do their utmost to help them, within limited means. Nevertheless, awash in self-loathing, slum children are driven to join something greater than themselves. Hardened survivors, they can handle grinding adversity, harsh discipline and the terrors of combat. Their gang leaders have been street-tested in armed combat. Those children who fail to adapt, die young.
By following this simple formula, weapon management can harvest an enormous crop of fine infantrymen at an instant’s notice. The more brutal their childhood, the greater the number of valuable recruits and invaluable small unit leaders. The end products are countless regiments of fine infantry; a sprinkling of elite commandos manned by certifiable sociopaths; a handful of sterling Learners like Booker T. Washington, M.L. King, Jesse Jackson, Cornell West, General/Secretary of State Collin Powell and their high-merit peers; and throngs of poverty-, ignorance- and crime-crippled victims. They are the massive human tailings of a rarefied ore from which – at great wastage – precious battle elites and expert weapon technicians may be refined.
“The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring
fatigue and hardship. Courage is only
secondary. Poverty, privation and want
are the schools of good soldiers.”
Napoleon, taken from Lieutenant Colonel Dave
Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to
Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, Little Brown & Co., Boston, New York,
Toronto, London, 1995. Printed by
permission.
Weapon management imposes long-term destitution on any society that hosts it. This fact is papered-over with standard weapon myths we have been taught to admire for ages. Anything and everything – bad weather, hostile gods, heretics, witches, druggies, drug lords and petty criminals, an aging workforce, welfare moms, inferior minorities, guerrillas and now terrorists – can take the blame for shriveling economies that should be thriving but never manage to.
For mature societies, mass poverty is never the cheapest way to go; on the contrary, it is the most expensive social policy. Let me repeat that for emphasis, since we’ve been told it so rarely (never).
Poverty is the most expensive social policy, by far.
No society ever grew rich by tolerating poverty. Info elites waste enormous wealth as they cultivate poverty and many other anti-profit weapons overheads.
By rights, that wealth should be ours to invest in peace. You would be amazed by the quality of peace Learners could buy with it, and the quantity of violence Learners could buy off with a tiny fraction of it.
However, higher living standards breed spoiled, argumentative and self-indulgent people: totally unsatisfactory cannon fodder. Social decadence is not bad per se, but it would be unwise to maximize prosperity and pacifism in one’s own people while the rest of the world attempts to meet its needs at gunpoint.
Mass poverty is never some stupid policy failure; it is not the outcome of selfish greed, insanity and corruption. Those are mere symptoms of the underlying illness: weapon mentality.
In fact, all money – the entire growth-dependent, zero-sum shell game based on compound interest so dear to politicians, business people, academics and conservative parasites who make up info elites – is merely a system of accounting for the huge sums of wasted labor and resources destined to feed global weapon technologies without producing any profit whatsoever. ‘Lack of money’ is our favorite excuse to rebuild anti-profit slums in the wake of our destructive wars.
There is a chicken and egg problem here: what came first? When orthodox economies go into decline, for whatever reason, reflexive militarism becomes an irresistible means to reassemble wealth at the top. When massed humans become all of a sudden poor, their first instinct will be to dust off ancient military protocols.
When I speak further on about Americans, I am also talking about all the others on Earth who have lost their soul in the naked embrace of weapon mentality. Make sure you are not suffering from the same illness while you gleefully slam Americans benighted by it.
Americans have been suckled on a toxic pap of obsessive materialism and vapid self-gratification gushing inexhaustible from luscious tits of television and its commercial advertising. By such means, they’ve been taught to obey their conscience only when it’s convenient, common sense only when convenient, good taste only when convenient. Political and social transformation won’t take place until it is convenient―or they will never happen, better yet.
They act as if their misdeeds, apathy and lousy decisions had no consequences. “If you don’t like what’s going on, just change the channel. Better yet, sit still and wait for the next meaningless commercial. Nothing of significance will change, regardless of what you do—and insignificance will multiply, regardless of what you do.” It has become a frenzy among them, to pursue mere indulgence to its extreme and exult blindly in their blind impunity. Thus American crooks and bigots thrive, protected by a slapdash definition of personal freedom.
The balanced reporting of American journalism? That just means evil is always given a head start. Whoever can pay more is entitled to lie, cheat, steal and get away with it indefinitely, more so than anyone poorer. The end product of “balanced American reporting” is dollar democracy: one million dollars equal one vote, and one voter equals nothing.
Someone else is always to blame for downstream disasters, not us Americans. We keep telling ourselves those disasters were aberrations, and not the toxic backwash of our rotten habits and institutions. Thus there’s no reason to change them!
Bismarck remarked that God seems to favor Americans, drunkards and crazy people. So Americans seem to get away with their shitstorm, more often than not. As a result, America has become nation of spoiled brats.
But the moment God looks the other way, duck and cover! 9/11, New Orleans and Gulf of Mexico disasters emerge, of epic proportion. At that point, Americans feel so sorry for themselves. And, of course, it must have been someone else’s fault. How could it not?
This nation’s business would not be so appalling if its citizens grew up just a little.
But they are, after all, only babies compared to Europeans’ deadly idiocy dozens of centuries senior, and that of the Middle East and China, older by millennia. Yet we have just a few short years before annihilation overtakes us, in the absence of major transformation. All we have to work with are those toddler Americans, plus everyone else endowed with their more fully-grown rot, supposed to transform this world in an instant. Good luck with that crew!
Until then, Americans are just a bunch of corn fed Republicans, which means fascist wannabes who haven’t quite got it perfect yet. Just give the USA enough rope to hang itself. Ronnie Raygun wasn’t quite perfect, but nearly so. What with the Bushes and Nixon and their toadies in the Supreme Court and Congress; let’s just elect another Weimar Democrat, a plaster figurehead. Decorative but ineffectual, his relative honesty and competence are the most than we can handle. One step back and three forward, blindly, into a Thousand Year Reich wrapped in the red, white and blue!
In Iraq, an American Army of mercenaries (anathema to the spirit of the Constitution) is practicing ‘pacification’ tactics with the military occupation of Buffalo, St. Louis and Seattle in mind. But don’t worry, be happy! Just be good little boys and girls, sit on your hands and watch it happen.
Nowadays, Americans may only harken to arrogant nihilism and dogmatic Puritanism―moral vacuity or empty moralism for their own sake. Mere profit, dogma, fad and convenience: those are the only ethical bearings we are allowed. Might as well try to breathe in a vacuum.
There is a golden mean, a middle ground of morality this country and WeaponWorld despise. Is the road to Hell paved with good intentions? In your dreams, perhaps. In reality, it is paved with Halliburton stock certificates (a Best Buy!).
Conscience, idealism, just plain doing good and avoiding evil: those things merit reverence and emulation, if only because they cause fewer unexpected disasters. Obey your conscience – even when it seems uncool, inconvenient and unprofitable – and achieve unforeseen miracles. Violate good conscience, good sense and good taste, and suffer more often from surprise disaster. Morality as simple probability and enlightened self-interest. Ignore it at your peril.
After this jeremiad of American failure, I must emphasize a central point.
Given our Gemini commonality, we Americans share more power, glory and genius than any other nation. For two centuries, America has been settled by the cream of the rest of the world―the very best and the worst. If we made wise, heroic and generous use of our advantages (in typically American fashion) we could neutralize our liabilities and failures.
Americans! Relax and let it all hang out. If we set our strongest sinews and nerves to their best workout of peace, we would find this effort gracefully natural—and its rewards, mind-boggling.
Other alternatives will be no fun at all.
“Thus I had the grief of discovering in the Manichaean
shrine K, a library which was utterly destroyed by water. When I had unearthed the door from the heaped-up
loess dust and sand, we found on the threshold the dried-up corpse of a
murdered Buddhist monk, his ritual robes all stained with blood. The whole room into which this door had led
was covered to a depth of about two feet with a mass of what, on closer
inspection, proved to be remains of Manichaean manuscripts. Loess water had penetrated the papers, stuck
everything together, and in the terrible heat of the usual summer there, all
these valuable books had turned into loess.
I took specimens of them and dried them carefully in the hope of saving
some of these manuscripts; but the separate pages crumbled off and dropped into
small fragments on which the remains of beautifully written lines intermingled
with traces of miniatures executed in gold, blue, red, green, and yellow, were
still to be seen. An enormous treasure
has been lost here...” Albert von Le
Coq, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New
York, Toronto, 1985, p. 61. By
permission of Oxford University Press.
The ruin in question was called Khocho, Ephesus, Dakianus, Idikuchahri, Kao-chang and Karakhoja. This chain of names reveals the rainbow of peoples it had housed over time.
Von Le Coq, a German of French Huguenot extraction, had the good fortune to die before World War II. Between the wars, he had painstakingly retrieved priceless museums-full of art, manuscripts and artifacts from treasure troves abandoned along the Silk Road—or looted them, depending on your point of view. During World War II, all those museums were incinerated under a hail of Allied firebombs. Countless schools, libraries, museums, houses of worship, record repositories and oral traditions were annihilated at the same time. This annihilation continues unabated as we speak.
This chapter is a casual survey of the destruction of ancient libraries and archives. To those of you concerned with fresher atrocities, please consult “Burning Libraries (AD)”.
In many cases, the mention of empires and capitals is the only clue we have of their disappearance. Those collections may have held vital pieces of our information puzzle. We’re so clever; we can’t even recall what happened to most of those lost archives.
According to Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, human beings coagulate into social ‘super-organisms.’ These may sometimes be based on shared genes and geography, but more often on shared memes: “theories, world views [and] cultures.” Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in The Selfish Gene, Oxford University, 1976. Merciless competition between meme super-organisms triggers most Prism misbehavior. The dissemination of Learners (and whatever content-equivalents may exist out there), is an uphill battle against the most dominant of our cultural memes, weapon mentality.
Tracing the disappearance of great libraries is like answering the Zen riddle: What sound does a tree make, if no one is there to hear it fall?
If a long list of dates and place names does not appeal to you, scan the next few paragraphs and skip the rest of this chapter (Burning Libraries BC) and the next one (Burning Libraries AD). Hopefully, you will have begun to grasp the vast sinkholes of lost memory we can’t overlook or recover. Huge info treasure-troves have sunk into uncharted oblivion. Peace information (perhaps crucial to our well-being) has vanished at an alarming rate—almost as quickly as Learners could think it up.
Look around you. Recall that we are sitting down together to share a super-deluxe pizza that stretches out past the horizon, covered with a thick topping of tasty goodies. But we are starving, since we focus our attention on a very narrow slice of this pie, a mere degree in width, charred black and gnawed bare: WeaponWorld and its peripheral supports. The infinite leftover (PeaceWorld) we hold out of sight and out of mind—as pseudo-science, magic, fantasy and utopian dream.
This chapter glosses vast stretches of space-time. Oftentimes, tales of destruction grew so wanton and redundant, I had no choice but to abridge, condense and skip many altogether. I have struggled against the myopic worldview inherited from my Western upbringing. According to it, the universe is an idealized dartboard laid out as follows. Caucasian nobility and upper bourgeoisie, their sycophants and satirists occupy a giant bull’s eye of exhaustive glorification. History’s worst pirates and murderers are honored with ceremonial salutes. Intensive study is made of Jewish, Greek and Roman war tribes—at the expense of everyone else.
Even those well-known tribes lost more than 99% of their literature.
Literary investigation gets more interesting when we seek lost epics that might have been the contemporaries of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or perhaps other Homeric writing. According to the English edition of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, a lost epic called The Return is supposed to have narrated the return from Troy and shipwreck of the Greek fleet under the command of Agamemnon, besides Odysseus’ ship, the Penelope. Then there’s the Oichalias Halosis or Sack of Oichalias of which only one line of text remains. That may have been the third book of Homer’s mutilated trilogy; http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/mailing_lists/BMCR-L/2002/0396.php. I will bet both those works were less enthusiastic about the glories of war—doubtless the main reason they didn’t survive.
Otherwise, a fixed inventory of soap opera novels and philosophical quibbles (the Great Books with but few exceptions) is selected for crashing boredom, labyrinthine verbiage (see Kant, Marx, et al.), biographical reductionism, trivial redundancy and masterful obscurantism. Its ultimate value may be summarized as follows: it provides a thoroughly unpleasant obstacle course for grad students, and an elaborate cultural code, the elements of which weapon elites may swap enthusiastically and forever, without ever clarifying the worst of their social contradictions. A greasy smokescreen that reveals nothing important: what rare genius! Meanwhile, all our real Learning texts have disappeared.
A handful of thousand-year-old religious texts provided job security for ancient copywriters who cloaked their ignorance in ambiguity. Today’s fundamentalists grace us with their ‘literal’ misinterpretations of equivalent value and clarity.
Narrow-minded weapon technologies and the ungainly scaffolding of scientific dogma that supports them are analyzed in microscopic detail, then are declared to be the only certainties in the Universe. I haven’t heard such unbelievable bunk sustained with so much zeal since, maybe, Lagash. Meanwhile, few texts exist on the destruction of ancient thought or on peace in general, for that matter: perhaps the most important and poorly documented topics on Earth.
Historical dates appear to fluctuate in direct proportion to the number of historians consulted and inversely to their expressions of certitude. For convenience’s sake, I used the last date referenced, provided it meshed with adjacent events. I invoked Procrustes whenever I had to trim dates to measure. Torn between the inter-relatedness of events and strict chronology, I’m afraid I’ve done violence to both.
My thanks to Hammond Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology; Encyclopedia of Library Science; The Timetables of History – The New Third Revised Edition by Bernard Grun; Timelines of War: A Chronology of Warfare from 10000 BC to the Present by David Brownstone and Irene Frank; The Encyclopedia of Military History by the Dupuy Brothers; Joseph A. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies; Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia as translated by Naomi Walford; War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents by Jeremy Black; and The New York Library Book of Chronologies by Bruce Wetterau. Those texts, as well as others cited below, provided multiple chronologies and cross-references. Also, Beck’s History of Ethics Chronological Index filled in many gaps; available at http://www.san.beck.org/AB-Chronology750-1300.html.
Many more reference texts did not receive the mention they deserve here. I am afraid I read them long before I began documenting this research in earnest. I wasn’t born knowing any of this stuff, so I should have footnoted every item.
Ancient cities formed sequential stacks of ruins based on some combination of sweet water, dependable crops, economic opportunity, defensible terrain and physical accessibility. Usually, some navigable waterway – the natural highway for ancient bulk transport and a dependable source of high-quality protein: fishing – was needed to feed a real city. Each town built upon the ruins of its (perhaps more elegant) predecessors.
For every mangled remnant of a text collection we retain from the past, hundreds of royal libraries and thousands of oral histories never made it. We have forgotten uncounted preliterate healers, bards, scribes, sibyls, shamans and witches in addition to conventional authors, editors, publishers and librarians. All of them celebrated the collective wisdom of their people; all of them forgotten.
For example, of the 142 books written by Livy, only 35 are left. He was one of the best documented of ancient Roman historians. You’ll find some more examples in this book and will have to imagine others of which no documentation remains. While you read this chapter, picture countless archives crumbling to ashes and dust; but think also of exquisite poetry, religion, medicine, psychology, botany, etc. – entire prehistoric civilizations, oral and written – silenced forever.
Remember, for most of historic time, soldiers were rarely paid except with weapons, booty and rations (and often not those). Wherever ancient armies marched, misery trailed close behind among the camp followers.
Also recall that Saddam Hussein’s tyranny was pretty average compared to most of those of old. His many persecutions and crimes mirrored those of antique weapon lords. Resentment and payback fantasies must have festered just as rotten among ancient urban inhabitants, as well as Ali Baba dreams of getting rich quick while no one stood guard. Thus, when ancient “regime change” induced a temporary power vacuum, local criminals must have risen up in riot, looting and arson, just the way the worst Baghdadis did when they got their chance. Any urban loot that armies did not destroy or carry away, local survivors would have plundered gladly.
I have tried to list the destruction of as many major towns as I could find. But do not assume that peace reigned elsewhere just because I don’t mention wars in that space-time continuum. Essentially, no civilization avoided war for much longer than a generation. Look at us, we haven’t. And we’re so advanced, sophisticated and peace loving!
Quite often, natural catastrophes overtook entire civilizations. At least every five years for the past few thousand, somewhere around the world, some important document collection suffered major damage along with its host population. Quite frequently, independent civilizations collapsed all at once, no matter how far apart their cities were spaced across the planet.
While the boastful inscriptions and booty ledgers of greasy warlords recorded the devastation summarized below, often no literati (literate people, Learners) survived to lament the end of remarkable civilizations. In effect, entire civilizations were erased from human memory—probably a majority of them and certainly the most peaceful ones.
According to Rick Potts in Humanity’s Descent (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1996, pp. 201-203), the oldest symbolic artifact is a female figurine carved from an exotic pebble, unearthed from an Israeli dig and dated 230,000 years old. In 2003, a perfectly formed hand-axe was found in a burial pit 300,000 years old; and, in 2008, traces of a fire set 790,000 years ago. Recognizable, chipped rock tools date back two and a half million years in Africa; more sophisticated, bi-faced hand-axes, as of 1.78 million years ago. All kinds of specialized hand-rock tool kits evolved about 150,000 years ago, including regional trade in favored kinds of stone. 130,000 years ago, Neanderthals carved, notched and engraved animal bones and teeth. Recognizable human symbols became widespread about 40,000 years ago. Their diversity exploded around 18,000 years ago, when climatic spikes of forbidding northern glaciers and frigid southern deserts drove human survivors into the Fertile Crescent.
Our ancestors, human and pre-human, were hammered mercilessly. We are history’s anviled progeny, beaten flat in a thousand folds, like the finest Japanese sword steel or French crumb pastry. Human DNA was brutally jetted through genetic bottlenecks, where all but a handful of breeding lines were wiped out. This has happened so often that we have become hard, sharp and brittle indeed – as well as very close siblings – all seven billion of us.
Personal codes, memory aids and perished written media may have driven Neolithic (10,000-50,000+ years ago), Paleolithic (older) or pre-human civilization.
After all, the few blue whales that survive these days, share daylong tunes planet-wide that vary seasonally. Do they demonstrate an advanced culture stripped of ‘hard’ technology?
Beyond a few knickknacks, cave wall paintings, knot strings and burial sites, we recognize no such records and no such signs of sentience. The scope of our arrogance is astounding, only matched by the depth of our ignorance.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat published her brainstorm in Before Writing, Volume One: From Counting to Cuneiform, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1992. She figured out that clay tokens were used as counters and memory enhancement devices, long before humans developed the writing we know about (8,000 to 4,000 BCE – before the Christian Era). The first written words were encoded inventories inscribed on the outside of clay ‘envelopes’ that held these tokens. Such tokens are uncovered from many prehistoric digs; they are some of the oldest fired-clay artifacts. Up until her time, we presumed that pre-historic writing never existed. A typical human conceit.
In The Chalice & the Blade, Riane Eisler presents a compelling case. She bases it on her interpretation of Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, 1989, Thames and Hudson, London.
About ten thousand years ago, matrilineal societies worshipped the Goddess. They occupied unfortified sites across Europe, Anatolia and the Middle East. Apparently, these people could be divided according to which articles they left in funeral sites: Beaker people or Axe people. The former buried (drinking?) beakers of soft metal with their dead; the latter, thin stone axe blades shaped like half- or quarter-moons, fragile and impractical as weapons.
Their habitats were lovingly selected for beautiful vistas, fertile fields and sweet water nearby. Houses were of uniform quality and surprisingly current design; they boasted whitewashed, multi-room interiors, latching doors, overhead storage spaces and windows with clear membranes. Their grain was stored in pits carefully lined with clay; this sealed moisture out and pest-destroying fermentation gasses in.
Is that why soda pop and beer go down so well with our cheapest fast food? Their carbon dioxide content would kill off nasty "bugs" that might provoke indigestion.
From Europe and Western Asia to many places in North Africa and the Middle East, we’ve found red ocher-covered remains and flower-filled burial sites. Many stylized female figurines surfaced, as did sculpted bull’s heads, moon crests, and double-headed axes (labrys) made from thin sheets of copper (i.e.: ornamental and non-weapon grade). Elitist claptrap such as weapons, personal armor and fortifications were largely absent.
It is anyone’s guess how these people handled the inevitable sociopaths and psychopaths that human genetics throw up. The most treacherous ones may have been ostracized and exiled out into the wilderness. Surviving outcasts might have radiated out onto the Eurasian steppe, to form the killer hordes described below. Otherwise, I’m afraid this Goddess worship cult implied the selective human sacrifice of the worst deviants.
This cult might have reflected a superior culture that thrived beforehand, drowned since.
Robert O’Connell, in Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War, believes that humans started out as peaceable, fully free Bushman-type hunter-scavengers. At first, they raised a few children devotedly into sane and healthy adults.
Afterward, they fell victim to the Plant Trap. In exchange for a marginally more reliable food source, the Plant Trap demanded unending stoop labor, submission unbefitting for huntsmen, and female hyper-fertility.
Plant-trapped women had to bear too many children; they were too abused, degraded and overworked to give their infants proper care. For example, prolonged breastfeeding was a natural method of pre-Plant Trap birth control, abandoned since. It also ensured that most infants would benefit from lavish attention and fondling during their first five years.
Babies carried at adult height would naturally assume an adult perspective of the world, much more readily than ground-crawling or wheeled ones. Fondled and carried aloft during the entirety of their waking infancy, they would have developed bodies with robust immunity, bones and musculature, along with more extensive neural networks.
The Plant Trap took away these hunter-gatherer benefits through sheer overwork, exhaustion and parental neglect. These problems worsened with small village hydro-agriculture and its evermore intensive labor requirements. They finally became unmanageable by free people when slave-driven hydraulic civilizations – the weapon organizations our historians love to praise – demanded corvée labor (korvay, ‘fatigue duty’, seasonal forced labor).
No matter how hard those caught up in the Plant Trap toiled, terrible famines followed transient years of plenty. While hyper-fertility multiplied farming manpower, it also accelerated overpopulation, epidemics and high infant mortality. The dense populations that agriculture demanded made plagues inevitable. Eventually, over-cultivated ecosystems collapsed and famine followed close behind. Warfare turned into a favored method to fine-tune this reciprocating engine of population explosion and collapse.
There ensued the split between Cain and Able, the herdsman and the farmer. Note that, unlike our prejudices, the farmer was found guilty in this story whose originators must have been biblical era herdsmen. The Bad Guy is always the Other in these stories, even though from a psycho-statistical perspective, most potential friends are among the Others and half the real enemies, among one’s own.
By the way, farm animals incubated most of the human epidemics. Pandemics had to wait for the urban world. Few diseases could jump from wild animals to hunter-gatherers and then spread beyond the initial infection site. Hunter-gatherers were too isolated from their fellows, compared to townsfolk.
I’m beginning to change my mind on this topic. The transmission of global pandemics by wild birds (as we’ve discovered with Avian Flu, West Nile Virus, etc.) could have struck these hunter-gatherers just as fiercely. In the absence of compulsive taboos that would have forbidden them from eating infected species more easily caught on the fly or harvested once aground, those birds presented as much of a death hazard to hunter-gatherers as to townspeople. Given a sky full of infected birds and hunting grounds crawling with sick scavengers, the relative dispersal of hunter-gatherers, compared to the cheek-by-jowl of city slickers, would have been irrelevant to this epidemiological problem. Otherwise, ancient infections could have been dispersed by those filthy hypodermic syringes in flight, mosquitoes.
Anyway, herdsmen were most miserable in late winter when their livestock was scrawny and least trade-worthy. At such times, herdsmen were sorely tempted to raid farm communities and rip off their known surpluses. However, when raiders crawled home burdened with loot, they were vulnerable to rapid pursuit, ambush and reprisal. According to O’Connell, they resorted to ultra-violence against the villagers, so that their shock and grief would impede effective pursuit. The farmers’ horrified reaction was to fortify their village walls; and those fortified enclosures became pressure-cookers of social stress, pestilence and tyranny. Besides, fortified farmers began attacking unfortified neighbors. Eventually, every surviving community got caught up in the bloody game. So concludes Mr. O’Connell.
This outcome would have resembled the fate that befell the ancient Iroquois. Intertribal warfare, fanned by overpopulation and resource depletion, grew so fierce that military anarchy reigned supreme. No one could venture beyond tribal fortifications to glean, hunt, fish, carry water and tend crops in safety. Starvation ruled the long houses and cannibalism became commonplace. No warrior mythology could survive the abuses of this circumstance.
The Iroquois endured endless misery and despair until they heeded the words of their Peace Maker, Deganawida. He was a Huron and should have been considered a dangerous outsider and a potential threat. Instead, when he preached of peace, plenty and confederation, they listened and followed his advice with religious devotion. Thus arose the most powerful Indian confederation, the Six Nations, which governed itself in internal peace for centuries.
Eventually, pro-French, isolationist and pro-British factions tore the Iroquois Confederacy apart. It became the prey of Western predation and disease. The framers of the American inspiration and governing models from traditional Iroquois politics.
Riane Eisler models slightly differently the outbreak of organized human violence. From 5000 BCE onward, Kurgan war bands overran every unfortified, Goddess worshipping community. Presumably, they exterminated everyone they found except female children.
A few grandiose palaces arose amidst miserable hovels, human sacrifice burials, elaborate weapon caches and oft-burnt stockades. Perched on earthen mounds and rocky crags, these fortifications were inaccessible, toilsome, ugly and uncomfortable. The rule of conscience was drowned in innocent blood. We have never recovered from this global disaster.
Lovely, modernistic figurines from the Cycladic Islands date back to 3500 BCE; other such cult artifacts dot Mediterranean shores.
Goddess worship barely survives today; it was decimated repeatedly by patriarchal decree. It has taken sophisticated weapons elites (like ours) a lot of patience and cunning to extirpate this worship. Nowadays, disinformation replaces brutality; goddess worshipers are slandered and trivialized instead of being massacred outright.
Later chroniclers would hearken back to a ‘Golden Age’ long past. They consigned subsequent generations to degenerate Bronze and Iron ages corresponding to the weapon grade materials at hand.
The Indian Vedas describe a longer succession of Ages (Yuga, Yurga) in combining cycles lasting around 24,000 years. Each corresponds to the recession of the vernal equinox: the complete rotation in the heavens of the Earth’s polar axis, also the oscillation of the solar system’s orbital plane above and below the galactic equator, which modern science confirms takes that long.
Humankind has emerged from (into?) the Kali
Yuga, the last and worst of four Ages from which morality and goodness have
virtually disappeared, compared to prior Yugas.
http://cycle-of-time.net/cycles_of_precession.htm
In this scenario, we must be Dioxin People of the Plutonium Age, (“half clay and half iron” according to Daniel’s Old Testament nightmare). We have turned into degenerates fleeing from the sharpened hooves of Four Horsemen to whom we’ve surrendered this planet: famine, pestilence, war and death. Then again, since we’ve hit bottom in terms of morality, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere left for us to go but up.
Chinese civilization arose nearly a thousand years after the Nilotic (Egyptian) and half that span after the Dravidian (Indo-Pakistani). Peaceful, Neolithic China seems to have suffered a similar degeneration. Millet cultivation dates back to 8,000 BCE in the North; and that of rice, to 5,000 BCE in the South. An archeologically recognizable transition, from pastoral peacefulness to military chaos, crushed China under hooves of Central Asian nomad cavalry from 3000 BCE onwards.
Recent (2008) discoveries in Syria show that wild cereals were being gathered from 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, before the last glacial maximum. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/research_pushes_back/. It is likely that primitive agricultural communities, almost as old or older, may be dug up in the future. Potsherds have surfaced on the Japanese islands of Tsushima, Kyushu and Shikoku that date as far back as the 16th millennium BCE.
Hundreds of standing stones were discovered at Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia in 1994, pairs of which are stacked in the form of a T and on which are carved high-relief friezes of animals and stylized human figures. They date back at least 9,000 years, thus to 7,000 BCE or prior, even before recognized agriculture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe.
Among the oldest known Neolithic villages is Catal Huyuk, founded in Anatolia c. (circa) 7000 BCE. Drawings, sculptures, tools, weapons, even a town map were found there.
Mehrgarh, a primeval town in what is now Pakistan, was founded in the 7th millennium BCE. Lipinski Vir, just off the Iron Gates of the Danube, was occupied c. 6000 BCE. Its inhabitants were hunter-gatherer villagers before they became farmers, proving this alternative is open to us. So were American Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, whose settled societies (among the richest in North America) were based on salmon fishing rather than agriculture. How many more fisheries/gardening communities were annihilated by rival agricultural/nomad militarists—that’s anyone’s guess.
In a dig forty miles south of Paris, a skeleton was discovered dating back to 4900 BCE. The forearm had been surgically amputated and the patient survived this operation at least for several months. The absence of infection in the body indicates that the operation was staged in a sterile field and that some sort of anesthesia was used. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/38229/
Around Varna in Bulgaria from 5,000 BCE on, a civilization called ‘Ancient Europe’ evolved an entire trading network of copper they purified in great heat and exported all the way to the Volga, of Spondylus shell jewelry imported from the Aegean Sea, and of other remarkable arts and crafts. If you subscribe to the degenerate belief that hierarchical societies might be superior to egalitarian ones (in any matter but the military), this one had already achieved this level of organization.
Arslantepe (Turkish for Lion Gate) was founded about 4,250 BCE. By 4,000 BCE, a major temple had been built on the site for the storage and distribution of food. Cereals had already been cultivated in Anatolia for three thousand years, and a thousand years prior in Palestine. Arslantepe would be abandoned during the collapse of the Assyrian Empire around 610 BCE.
The first documented American civilization sprang up about 5,000 years ago or 3,000 BCE. The latest ‘first’ urban civilization in South America is said to be Caral, 120 miles north of Lima, Peru; its excavations come complete with monumental architecture and irrigation agriculture dating back to 2,627 BCE (and thus contemporaneous with Egyptian equivalents). The site of Norte Chico was recently excavated on the Peruvian Plateau. It lasted for 1,200 years before its people moved to the north and the south into larger upland valleys and shifted from fishing and gardening as primary food sources to intensive corn cultivation. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6829.
The first known documents began with an Egyptian calendar stretching back to 4,241 BCE. Vedic texts may be (much) older, based on old astronomical observations found in them. These Vedas were transmitted across thousands of years of absolute illiteracy by miraculously error-free oral recitation methods. Entire Vedic texts (no doubt the more peaceful ones) disappeared in the process.
Egypt first unified around 3,100 BCE. Protected by vast desert wastes, proto-Egyptians endured many civil wars (including a seven hundred year hiatus chillingly dubbed “Anarchy”). Eventually, its national power consolidated along the Nile’s narrow flood plain.
It used to be strictly forbidden to build urban enclaves on that flood plain, which was reserved for agriculture alone. We shall see if Egyptians come to regret having disobeyed such a strict commandment.
Egypt was raided, invaded, occupied by and self-liberated from the Nubians and their northern allies, the Hyksos, in 1800-1600 BCE; the People of the Sea in 1200-1170 BCE; Philistines and Ethiopians in 730 BCE; and Assyrians and Libyans in 671 BCE. Around 661 BCE, the Assyrians managed to sack Thebes. It had been the Egyptian capital since 2100 BCE with its giant Temple of Ammon. In 605 BCE, Babylonia drove Egyptian armies from Syria and Palestine.
Back then, in those cities that we can ‘read into,’ nothing existed but palaces, barracks, bazaars and hovel/shops. For millennia, local ‘temples’ served as banks, mints, monasteries, palmistries, time and calendar keepers, geomancies, post offices, warehouses, wholesalers, hotels, brothels, museums, libraries, publishing houses, advertising agencies, newspapers, radio stations, cathedrals, theaters, casinos, flophouses, observatories, hospitals and universities, plus other functions we have forgotten since. If you valued curiosity, imagination and fellow feeling, priesthood was the only game in town, despite its built-in reactionary tendencies.
What was the attrition rate of ancient Egyptian archives? Think how easily buried vaults-full of papyrus and clay tablets must have disappeared during centuries of lawlessness. Dust to clay – then fire, blood and flood – then back again to dust.
The ultimate Egyptian library probably lies sunken under the bed of the Nile – intact and unrecognized – level with the Pyramids at Gizeh. Its location would be cryptically indicated by the geometrical relationship between those pyramids and the stars of the constellation Orion. In this case, the Nile would represent the Milky Way. The library’s location, buried and sealed below the waters of the Nile, would be represented by the brightest star at the intersection of the Milky Way and this constellation as oriented when these monuments were built, and that did not already reflect an existing monument; otherwise, wherever it would be least inconvenient to divert the Nile upstream of another passage of that river corresponding to another astronomical house. No one in a position of authority seems to care. Which might not be such a bad thing, given the prevalence and reach of modern grave robbers?
Clay tablets turned into indestructible ceramic when imperial palaces burned down with their library annexes. There remains the minor problem of uncovering those collections and deciphering them. Forget parchment, vellum, paper and papyrus archives; any environment less sterile than a salt desert would have rotted them away.
Think of those ephemeral papers and parchments. Were they scribed with cuneiform fingernail markings on leaves fresh-picked from broadleaf trees lining stately urban avenues? That’s how I picture it, had there been nothing but Nature and low-tech to call upon. Any document so transcribed would be less than mulch today; archives containing those documents would be thick-carpeted with indecipherable loam.
Some ancient Chinese collections have survived:
· The An-yang, Hunan collection of Shang Dynasty oracle bones 1523-1027 BCE;
· The Ma-wang-tui collection of 120,000 characters inscribed on silk, 722-481+ BCE;
· The collection at Chu-yen Lake in NW China. 10,330 pieces of poplar or willow bark inscribed and bundled together. The collection covers a period from 468-221 BCE;
· The collection of Tun-huang, Kansu. 20,000 paper scrolls from 406 CE (Christian Era) into the 1000’s CE; and
· The collection of Yin-ch’uen-shan, Lin-i County, Shantung: 4,942 bamboo slips in Han tombs from circa 1100-1200 CE, including the original manuscript of Sun Pin’s Ping-Fa, The Art of War.
Please excuse me for not using the approved Pinyin Chinese-English transliteration script. I have grown too old and slow-minded to learn yet another alphabet and spelling system (there seems to be another one for every foreign language transcribed into English―with very little justification besides the ego trip of linguists). I have a hard enough time dealing with common English, much less HTML…thank you very much.
The feudal Chou oversaw the first Golden Age of China, when mundane coercion was carefully balanced against the newfound payoffs of civilization. This proto-peace technology lasted from 1122 BCE until 771 BCE. It was during this period of peace and the following times of trouble that the Confucian canon, the Five Classics, were written. They include the I Ching (Book of Changes), the Shu Ching (Book of History), the Shih Ching (Book of Odes), the Li Chi (Book of Rites), and the Ch’un Ch’u (Spring and Autumn Annals). The last ruler of Western Chou died in battle. Northern invaders profited from internal discord to sack his capital, Hao. The Eastern Chou never took up the slack from their capital at Loyang.
China endured vicious assaults throughout the Spring and Autumn period (770-464 BCE) and the Warring States period (463-222 BCE). Wu forces under General Sun Tzu, author of yet another Art of War, destroyed the Ying capital, Ch’u (modern Jiang-ling, Hubei) in 506 BCE. The Four Books comprise the Lun Yü (Analects of Confucius), the Meng Tsu (Book of Mencius), the Ta Hsüeh (a treatise on practical wisdom) and the Chung Yung (Doctrine of the Mean). These nine works would form the bedrock of Chinese thought for the next three thousand years. What equivalent or superior works perished?
In 213 BCE, Prince Chen Shih-huang-ti (First Ch’in Emperor) complied with the advice of his prime minister, the reactionary Legalist Li Ssu, and proscribed all schools of philosophy. He had every book burnt except the writings of fellow Legalists and ‘useful’ works on medicine, divination and agriculture. Seven years later – after book lovers in China had been buried alive for shielding their library and almost every book had been burned – the Ch’in capital at Hsien-yang burned down. This fire destroyed the last copy of most of the proscribed titles.
Founders of the Han Dynasty rescued a few useful texts before the old capital burned down. The brilliantly cruel Han established two archives: Shih-ch’u Hall and T’ien-lu Hall.
Emperor Wu established more collections around 147-80 BCE. Ssu-ma Chien studied Chinese imperial collections intensively in order to prepare his Shih Chi (Historical Records) circa 100 BCE. Around year zero CE, Lui Hsiang produced the first known annotated Chinese bibliography, the Pieh Lu. His son, Liu Hsin, produced China’s first surviving classified catalog, the Ch’i lueh.
Elsewhere, the Sumerian record goes back to the fifth archaeological level of Uruk, which dates from around 3500 BCE. Up until around 2000 BCE, Sumerian text remnants are rare. Uruk ruled until 1700 BCE, the date of origin of a King’s List: our periscope into Sumerian proto-history. At that time, the cities Ur and Mari contended for dominance. The empire of Akkad stretched from the Mediterranean to the northern headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates; it lasted from 2,340 to 2,154 BCE when its purpose-built capital, Agade, disappeared under swarms of disgruntled mountaineers, never to reappear.
Nearly simultaneously, some planetary disaster overtook the Old Kingdom of Egypt; the Early Bronze Age civilizations of Israel, Anatolia and Greece; the Indus Valley civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro; that of Hilmand in Afghanistan; and the Hongshan Culture in China. Every urban culture on Earth was destroyed at the same time: (World War, indeed!).
From their ancient city of Ur, the Chaldeans ruled both Akkad and Sumer. Elamite invaders sacked it in 2,000 BCE. Established around 3,500 BCE, Ur was flash-buried in eight feet of river sediment sometime around 300 BCE. The Sumerian language was the most sophisticated literary medium of its day; it served Middle-Eastern elites much the way Chinese served the feudal Japanese, Latin did Europeans during the Middle Ages, and the elaborations of calculus distinguish our info elites from their less numerate info proletarians like me.
Babylon was established c. 2,000 BCE. The cities of Larsa, Isin, Eshnunna, Marti, Khana, Elam and Ugarit were founded around the same time. The Hittites took over Babylon in the 18th century BCE, and the Cassites, in 1746 BCE. In 1759 BCE, Hammurabi of Babylon sacked Mari, a Syrian city that had reigned supreme for centuries. Its archive of 25,000 cuneiform tablets is our principal source of historical texts for Northern Syria and Mesopotamia.
Assyrian Emperors were obsessed with military terrorism. They sought iron-fisted control over the cities of the upper Tigris from 3,000 until as late as 612 BCE. They did this despite Hittite raids from the northwest, Sumerian-Babylonian conflicts in the southeast and universal rebellion by every community they conquered, at every opportunity no matter how desperate the outlook.
Anything up to and including elaborate death by torture at Assyrian hands was preferable to their long-term rule. Rebellion became inevitable. A word of warning to those who worship the death penalty and the structural brutality that it implies throughout society.
Babylon was sacked around 1180 BCE, this time by Assyrians. Among many other cities, the Assyrians destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE, then Susa, the capital of Elam, dating back to 5000 BCE. Vengeful Babylonian survivors then massacred the forces of Elam, Assyria and Arabia. I wonder how many people changed sides at the last moment?
Even the location of the Mittani Empire’s capital, Washukanni, is unknown. Much like the United States of America, the Mittani were the cat’s meow for a couple of centuries from 1595 to 1334 BCE. The Hittites conquered many Mittani cities including Aleppo. Their capital, Hattush or Khattusha (near the Turkish village of Boghazkoy) lasted from 1792 BCE until either the Gasga (Kaska) or the Peoples of the Sea burned it to the ground just before 1380 BCE. At that point, the Hittite Empire achieved military parity with Egypt once again, only to watch its Syrian and Anatolian cities succumb around 1204 BCE. Local writings vanished for more than a century.
Minoan civilization arose on the island of Crete around 2000 BCE. Its combination temple-commissary-civic center-palace structures were rebuilt in 1700 BCE after a series of earthquakes, revolts and/or raids damaged them. The Minoan Golden Age lasted until 1450 BCE, when a nearby volcano, Thera, exploded. It annihilated the societies established on Thera, Crete, and who knows where else across the Aegean and further downwind?
Theran culture may have been more brilliant than the Minoan, the same way St. Petersburg outshines stuffy old Moscow. Or maybe Thera was a military base and naval harbor dedicated to defend the demilitarized and idyllic island of Crete, the same way Pearl Harbor serves the enchanted island of Maui.
In any case, this eruption projected mighty tidal waves across Aegean shores and disrupted growing seasons with meter (yard) thick ash falls. It probably wrecked every flotilla in harbor and on the beaches. Opportunistic (Mycenaean?) invaders followed up, snuffing out this bright flame of civilization.
In their heyday, Minoans civilized themselves through Goddess cult redistribution of forest products, highland wildlife, abundant fisheries, fertile agriculture and master craftsmanship. Olive groves had flourished in Crete since at least 3,500 BCE. (Based on recent archeological evidence, the Armenians may have been the earliest known cultivators of the vine). Relatively few and insignificant fortifications have been be found there; no fortified harbors exist, no city walls, no militarist or kingly inscriptions.
Minoan frescoes and potsherds are decorated with a fantastic naturalism. That and their preference for ochre red and carbon black call to mind Neolithic artwork. Bronze circlets girded wasp-waisted youths, and fashionable attire uncovered young women’s breasts.
With all due respect to Ms. Ursula K. Le Guin, I salute a culture lighthearted and self-disciplined enough to permit this fashion statement without disrupting the peace. Imagine the uproar this kind of indulgence would cause in our ‘modern’ barbaric societies.
Clean running water was piped into every home (even heated water), and wastewater was piped away. Houses were of equal size and quality across the population. Here’s another peace equity we haven’t matched since.
Bulls are depicted tossing priestly dancer/acrobats between their horns and over their mighty shoulders. This ceremony was thought to portray a suicidal and practically impossible ritual confrontation. A fighting bull doesn’t lift his horns straight up, the way a bulldozer operator lifts his blade. Instead, it hooks its horns diagonally from below across the vitals of its enemy, the way a cunning knife fighter would.
More than likely, children destined for priesthood were encouraged to raise prized calves as beloved pets, then trained with them as adolescents to play this sacred dancing game. In the same way, Asian peasant children frolic with their family’s water buffalo in the village duck pond. Strangers (especially suetty Westerners) risk sullen attack from the same tame beasts.
Some people postulate that the entire Cretan civilization was a fake. It may have been a giant stage-set mausoleum peddled across the Mediterranean as a funereal Paradise for wealthy investors who had died and been turned into mummies: Club Dead. Yet all that beautiful art was aimed just as much to amaze its audience (in this case, us), as to lure from overseas the embalmed corpses of fat slave owners.
Nothing decipherable remains of Minoan written culture except accounting ledgers. The elegant vibrancy of its artwork astounds us, and its prose and poetry must have kept pace. Too bad nothing decipherable remains for us to read.
It may well be, as Graham Hancock suggests in Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, (Crow Publishers, New York, 2002), that law and custom restricted artistic/religious expression to oral presentation and painstaking memorization; and written words were only used for inventories, calendars and suchlike profit-grubbing and high tech.
Some hypothesize that the Sea People or Philistines may have been post-disaster Minoan evacuees. The ancient Greek historian and avid purveyor of superstition, Herodotus (The History of Herodotus, Tudor Publishing Company, 1943, Dial Press, Inc., 1928, George Rawlinson, Trans., Manuel Komroff, Ed.), ascribes a Minoan origin to the Spartans—those loathsome weapon technicians. Then again, I love to purvey so-called ‘superstitions’ as much he did; they’re quite entertaining.
Others postulate that Cretan civilization was the last outpost of the mythic Atlanteans. They may have occupied Thera or other islands now obliterated.
Plato – quoting his mentor Solon, a statesman and natural philosopher renowned for his honesty – asserted that this civilization was ten thousand years old in his day. Solon had learned this from priest/historians in Egypt. Modern historians assert that those Egyptians were vague as to whether they were counting in thousands or tens of thousands of years. I suspect that they were dead serious when they said it happened ten thousand years before their time.
Just our luck: one of the most brilliant civilizations in human memory, stuck at ground zero of a planetary catastrophe.
Simcha Jacobovici directed a brilliant documentary film, The Exodus Decoded, in which he merges the Hyksos and the Jews into one historic people, the Ten Plagues of Egypt and the drowning of the Egyptian Army during their expulsion and Exodus as direct outcomes of the volcanic explosion of Santorini. See http://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Decoded-History-Channel/dp/B000HOJR8A.
The Atlantis myth gains some credence from striking similarities shared by trans-oceanic civilizations: sculpted faces with distinctly foreign racial features, and remarkably analogous trade artifacts, cultural habits and monumental architecture.
The famous historian, Fernand Braudel, noted that all the initial sites of organized agriculture in the Mediterranean basin were settled at elevations of 600 to 900 meters (nearly 2000 to 3000 feet) above sea level; (Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, Alfred A. Knoff, New York, 2001, translated by Siàn Reynolds, p. 40). Did these sites survive a series of super tsunamis that wiped out prehistoric civilization everywhere else?
The predatory Mycenaeans didn’t last much longer than their Minoan victims. From 1200 BCE on, more and more of their palaces were set on fire and fearsome fortifications flourished. Their at-best middling artwork grew rarer and shoddier. Local archeology reveals that trauma casualties rose to 90%, an incredible proportion of the population denoting systematic internal genocide. What a frightful birthplace for the civilization of Homer and Plato!
The Indian subcontinent hosted many invaders including the nomadic Yueh-chi from China, Sakai or Shaka nomads from Central Asia, and others listed below. During intervals from 2,400 to 1750 BCE, sophisticated Dravidian and Aryan cultures colonized and evacuated the city-states of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. (Victorian engineers would mine the ruins of Harappa to lay one hundred miles of cheap brick roadbed under the Lahore-Multan railway). Back then, there were at least 2,500 prehistoric settlements. Equitable housing was found here as were elaborate public granaries and sewage systems. Unfortunately, these cultures are opaque to us: their language, writings and social instruments irretrievable.
Massive earthquakes uplifted the land. The sun “burned up” the mighty Sarasvasti River (now the Ravi?) along the banks of which Harappa flourished, halfway between present-day Multan and Tagore, about which we will hear again. This, according to In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India, by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, Quest Books, 1995. Other rivers (especially Mohenjo-Daro’s Indus further downstream) were battered by massive earthquakes. Elaborate irrigation projects were wrecked and desert sands buried croplands and orchards. The survivors must have suffered from an apocalyptic sense of despair.
As we speak, India and Pakistan are thumping this deceptively quiet landscape with atomic blasts. They’re just inviting renewed tectonics.
Few records remain of these flourishing civilizations, beyond the Vedas. They are obscurely written symbolic epics written down around 1500-1200 BCE though much older by way of oral transmission. A succession of Dravidian and Aryan linguistic groups appear to have occupied the same ground at intervals. Fighting and/or replacing each other, they bred the Vedic religion, the immediate predecessor of Hinduism. Hinduism emerged with scriptures called the Upanishads finally written down between 600 and 400 BCE.
Back in 1200 BCE, the Sea People subjected many Mediterranean cities to amphibious attack. Fatally weakened by the iron-armed Assyrians, the Hittite Empire and its capital, Aleppo, were destroyed. Concurrent catastrophes (or one planetary one) terminated the Shang Dynasty of China, the Mycenaeans of Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom as well as the Late Bronze Age civilization in Israel. Crop-destroying bad weather, river-draining super-quakes and/or scattergun comet/asteroid impacts may have brought these civilizations to their knees. Scientific opinion varies. In the late 13th and early 12th Centuries BCE, Ugarit, Enkomi, Citum in Cyprus, the Canaanite towns of Tyre, Sidon and Biblos (presumably the invention site of books) went under—some never to reemerge.
Troy (during the greatest of its nine incarnations) was sacked and burned around 1250 BCE. Thebes in Greece underwent the same fate about the same time. Perhaps it succumbed to the same amphibious pirates.
The Iliad and Odyssey are two of the primary sources of Western psycho-military inspiration. In them, Homer chronicles the annihilation of the city of Troy and the aftermath of that disaster; he does so centuries after the fact. The story becomes even more interesting if one looks for lost epics that may have been their contemporaries or written by Homer himself. The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology lists a lost epic called The Return, which is supposed to narrate the return from Troy and mass shipwreck of the rest of the Greek fleet under Agamemnon’s command, besides Odysseus' ship, Penelope. Then there's the Oichalias Halosis or Sack of Oichalias of which only one line remains. It may have been the third book of Homer's mutilated trilogy. http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/mailing_lists/BMCR-L/2002/0396.php. I'll bet that both works were a lot grimmer and less enthusiastic about the glories of war, which may have been why they disappeared.
Palestine was another bloody cockpit: the highway to hell that connected three continents. How any God of Love could have picked that snake pit for His Chosen People, is beyond me. Not that the strategic dead-ends of Norway, Tasmania or South Africa were much better… wholesale murder flourished in any case.
The five towns of Phillistia in southwest Palestine (Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron [never rediscovered] and Gath); Phoenician cities on the Lebanese coast: (Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, Aradus and Byblos); and Aramean kingdoms of eastern Syria (including Damascus), all fought each other furiously. After surviving punitive expeditions from above-mentioned powers, the Canaanite cities were exterminated, presumably under the Jewish God’s direction. These included one of the earliest of cities, Jericho, founded c. 9,200 BCE.
Joshua captured Jerusalem in 1451 BCE. David established his capital in Jerusalem after he had massacred its Jebusite inhabitants in 1004 BCE. He went on to destroy the Philistines who had offered him royal refuge from Saul, his own vindictive king. Solomon’s hands were somewhat less bloody. His elite propaganda corps immortalized his inhuman wisdom. This done, he ordered the Temple of Jerusalem to be built: a very costly project for the poor to bare, like everything else he did. After this reign, Judah and Israel fought for two hundred years. Amaziah, King of Judah, conquered Edom (now Jordan). He forcefully converted the Edomites to Judaism and captured Petra. According to Paul Lackman, the family of Herod the Great was of Edomite origin. His subsequent mass murder of first-born Palestinian males may have seemed to him a fitting vengeance. Israeli King Jehoash took Amaziah prisoner, entered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple in 775 BCE.
Incurably shadistic Assyrians besieged Samaria, stormed Jerusalem, crushed Jewish resistance and sacked the city in 721 BCE. They conquered the Kingdom of Ararat in Armenia (Urartu?) and sacked its capital, Musdasir, in 714 BCE. This turned out to be not such a good idea, (like most weapons ‘ideas’). Urartu had screened Assyria from Cimmerian steppe nomads. Their cavalry army erased what was left of Urartu, then its Assyrian garrison, then the Assyrian King and his field army. Those Assyrians – always eager to whip themselves into another frenzy of slaughter – destroyed the cavalry Kingdom of Phrygia in Anatolia from 800 to 709 BCE. The latter was famous for King Croesus’ golden touch.
Napata, the Sudanese capital city of Cush, thrived from the 8th century until the mid-6th BCE. Thereafter, Meroë became the Cushite capital until sometime around the 10th century CE. At one time, the Cushites dominated Egypt. They built their own pyramids and disseminated iron technology at spearpoint throughout Central Africa. Founded around 750 BCE, Meroe was destroyed by Ethiopean Aksumites in the 4th century.
Axum benefited from a climatic interregnum during which two rainy seasons fell on the Abyssinian plateau’s rich volcanic soil and permitted two crops a year. It dominated Red Sea trade from the 7th century BCE until the 7th CE – several centuries after the twin rainy seasons reverted to one per year and starved out that population.
Wise men of the Dogon tribe of Mali can point out the star (Sirius B, invisible except with advanced telescopes) from which their tribe descended to Earth, to the satisfaction of baffled astronomers. Their region has a mound of iron tailings weighing hundreds of thousands of tons. According to Professor Vincent Serneels of the Swiss Friburg Institute of Mineralogy and Petroleum Sciences, they manufactured ten or more tons of iron implements per year for centuries, for distribution to the rest of ancient Africa.
In 612 BCE, Medes and resurgent Chaldeans-Babylonians destroyed the Assyrian capital at Nineveh. The clay tablet content of the Sargonid imperial library was fired into ceramic when it burned down. Waves of mud sealed the collection, which was uncovered only recently.
Babylon destroyed the Holy Temple of the Jews, it razed Jerusalem and deported its people in 586 BCE. They were released from captivity and allowed to go home by Cyrus the Great of Persia (one of the few “Greats” who actually deserves that appellation through his genial benevolence after military conquest – even though he wound up dying stupidly during the failed conquest of yet another peripheral tribe). The whole “Promised Land” remained under alien control for the next twenty-seven centuries. Today, its Palestinian and Israeli inhabitants are hopelessly Balkanized until they wake up to the idea that their country could become another Switzerland: twice as peaceful, ten times more prosperous and much holier. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Tyre in 574 BCE. Babylon burned in 538 BCE, with much loss of life.
Tartessos was a great emporium on the coast of Andalusia, an ancient trading city founded around 1200 BCE. From then until 669 BCE, it monopolized trade beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Herodotus noted its tremendous wealth in two stories about Phoenician merchants who came home and built city walls and a man-sized devotional urn of precious metal from the profit of their trip to Tartessos. The Carthaginians took Tartessos in the early 400’s and controlled its thriving trade in amber, tin (a critical component of bronze, very rare in the Mediterranean Basin and plentiful in England and Brittany), callais, a kind of translucent turquoise, and furs, in exchange for the wine and finished products of the Med. The Romans annihilated the city when it revolted in 195 BCE. They built a military camp nearby, now the Spanish city of Jerez. There is no trace of Tartessos and its location is unknown.
Phoenician colonists settled Carthage around 800 BCE. The casualties of three ‘World Wars’ dyed the Mediterranean blood-red from 264 until 146 BCE when the Rome finally annihilated Carthage. Its legionaries sowed the ruins with salt so that nothing would grow there again. The main library in Carthage was said to have contained 500,000 volumes of Phoenician art, science and history. Its authors and their Phoenician ancestors were master mariners, canny merchants, fearless explorers and disseminators of our common alphabet, among other clever inventions. In ruthless pursuit of trade monopoly, Carthage destroyed many Mediterranean cities including the Sicilian towns of Himera and Selinus (409 BCE), Agrigento (406 BCE) and Acragas (c. 400 BCE) home of the philosopher Empedocles.
Established in 1100 BCE, Alba Longa was destroyed by Rome in 600 BCE. Rome itself originated around 725 BCE. Numa, Rome’s second king, invented the most enduring Roman political instruments, then sealed his last writings in a time capsule before he died. The Roman Senate reverently dug it up six hundred years later—then declared its content a shameful forgery and had it burned. It would no doubt have made fascinating reading.
Officially, Western libraries are said to have begun with the Greeks around the 6th century BCE. The Lyceum was established in Athens in 336 BCE. Subsequently, Athenians buried and badly damaged their collection to prevent its acquisition by rival Pergamum. The Romans took the remnants home with them in 40 BCE.
Greek Ionia (Greek colonies on the Turkish Peninsula and among the Aegean Islands) was the mixing-bowl of Eastern and Western thought: the fountainhead of ‘Greek’ philosophy. The Persians became enraged when Ionian Greeks burned down their splendid Lydian capital, Sardis in present-day Turkey. They had already stormed Babylon in 538 BCE; they sacked it again and wiped it out in 519 BCE. When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon in 538, he let the Jews return home. In retaliation for Sardis, the Persians razed the Greek colony of Miletus (494 BCE). They destroyed forever the works of philosophers Thales and Anaximenes among others. By 479 BCE, Persia had sacked and burned every Ionian city. Some of the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus’ work survives—probably because he coined such gems as: “War is the father of all things.”
Athens annihilated Aegina (457 BCE), Potidaea (430 BCE) and Melos (416 BCE), source of the Venus of Milo. Platae, Athen’s ally, was destroyed by Thebes and Sparta (427 BCE). Insectile Sparta reduced the city of Messene into a warehouse of Helot slaves.
Phidias was the greatest sculptor in ancient Greece. Not a single original or good copy of his work survives. Not his statue of Zeus in the temple of Olympus (another of the Seven Wonders of the World, similar in pose and twice the size of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC). Not his Athena Parthenos, the foremost pride of Athens. Both colossi were adorned with draperies of beaten gold and flesh parts made of brilliantly pealed, softened and molded plates of ivory. The Zeus was shipped off to Constantinople where a fire reduced it to ashes in 462. The same thing happened to all the strikingly realistic paintings of Zeuxis (born in Southern Italy during the late 5th century BCE) and no doubt the works of thousands more inspired artists.
By the way, eleven of Aristophanes’ forty known plays survive today, seven of Aeschylus’ ninety, seven of Sophocles’ one hundred twenty, and nineteen of Euripides’ ninety-two. All the written works of Chionides, Magnes, Cratius and countless others were lost. The seven sages of the Greek world during the 6th century include: Bias, Chilon, Cleobulus, Periander, Pittacus, Solon and Thales. For the most part, only a few pithy quotes remain of their lifetime achievement, if that.
“The subtle evocation of the sacred through implicit ideas
and images is characteristic of what many regard as the supreme genre of
mountain art in the world – Chinese landscape paintings…
“The expression used to designate landscape paintings –
shan-shui, “mountain-water” – highlights the importance of mountains, or shan,
in Chinese thought as one of the two basic constituents of the natural
environment. The second element, shui or
“water,” takes the form of streams or rivers that issue from the heights or
peaks to wind about their feet and spread across the plains…Together the two
engender the totality of nature and reveal the presence of the Tao.
“One of the most famous and influential artists of the T’ang
Dynasty, Chang Tsao, who worked in the 8th century, was a wild-eyed
figure who brought the spirit of the mountains directly into the act of
painting. …More than a painter of
landscapes, Chang Tsao transcended his art to become an exemplar of the artists
as sorcerer and sage. The dynamic force
of his personality and the effortless perfection of his style played an
important role in shaping the ideals and aspirations of those who followed
him. Unfortunately, none of his
paintings have come down to us. [Italics
mine.] Edwin Bernbaum,
Sacred Mountains of the World, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1997, p.p. 226-227.
Founded in the 8th century, the island town of Mozia was the most important Phoenician colony in Sicily. It was destroyed in 397 BCE by Dionysus the Elder, despot of Syracuse. The Romans destroyed Veii, an ancient Etruscan city, in 396 BCE. The Gauls and their Celtic allies destroyed the Roman Army in 390 BCE, then they sacked Rome and burned all its archives. By 380 BCE, Persia had burned down Athens and many other Greek cities. In 373 BCE, the ancient city of Helike on the Gulf of Corinth was destroyed by an earthquake and submerged by a tsunami. Apparently, an Early Bronze Age city two thousand years older and located nearby had suffered the same fate.
Corinth was a pretty average big town of the Classical Age. A regional capital, it was founded around 6,000 BCE on the narrow Isthmus of Corinth that connected the Peloponnesus with mainland Greece. It is famous for the Corinthian order of architecture (in addition to the Doric and Ionic, prior): the most ornate and complicated one; and for the canal cutting across it and named after it, only successfully deepened in 1893. As far back as 600 BCE, a flat highway had been cut across the isthmus, allowing smaller Greek ships to be rolled across it. Like Panama, it grew rich from commercial traffic, which turned it into a magnet for any armed horde in the vicinity.
Corinth was destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE, by earthquakes in 375, 551 and 856 CE. It was plundered by Normans in 1147, sacked by Crusaders after a five-year siege in 1210; by Byzantines in 1388; by Ottomans in 1395; again by Byzantines in 1403; and again by Ottomans in 1458; by Venetians in 1687; by Ottomans in 1715; and destroyed by the Turks in 1830. It was leveled by earthquake in 1858 and 1928, and by fire in 1933. The usual routine for Mediterranean cities.
In 342 BCE, the Persian Empire destroyed Sidon, one of the great seaports of Phoenicia, in retaliation for the vital help it had given the Greeks during the naval battle of Salamis. This fight took place just off smoldering Athens, which the Persians had burned to ground.
Alexander the Great (Butcher of Human Flesh) destroyed Greek Thebes in 335 BCE, Phoenician Tyre and Gaza in 332 BCE. Almost every “X the Great” merits this job description. Perhaps we should paraphrase the German language and call them “X the Gross.” He also captured Jerusalem in 333 BCE, as well as several other metropolises that were too sophisticated and independent-minded for his taste.
The tomb of Mausolus of Caria was erected in the city of Halicarnassus by his sister/widow; it was the Taj Mahal of the ancient world, one of its Seven Wonders (from which we derive the word mausoleum). It burned down with the rest of the city under Alexander’s direction. In 330 BCE, he destroyed the brand new, fully archived Persian capital at Persepolis. According to Plutarch, he carried away its looted treasures on 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels. He destroyed 12,000 cattle hides upon which Zarathustra had encoded the entire Zoroastrian religion.
The Pyramids mystify us today because Alexander executed all the pyramid-expert priests of Heliopolis and Persepolis. For personal reasons, he annihilated every Egyptian text he could find. Priestly survivors declared him a god because he clove with his sword a large knot that was called Gordian and said to be incurably snarled. Well, duh! But can you blame them?
Alexander’s place as history’s most noble mass murderer is partly attributable to the instruction he received from Aristotle, his personal (and this civilization’s premier) weapon mentor. He slashed his way from the outback of Macedon as far as the Indus. Then he lost most of his troops to thirst during their mutinous return home across the desert of what is now Sind, Pakistan. Whoops! Shortly after his premature demise, his Successors sacked the holy city of Benares on the Ganges. Otherwise known as Varanasi or Kasi, it was another of the world’s oldest cities.
A crazed attention-getter (whose name merits oblivion) set fire to the world-renowned temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BCE, the same day Alexander the Gross was born. Under the Seleucid Successors of Alexander, the Western World’s administrative centers were Pella in Macedonia (the birthplace of Alexander), Pergamum in Asia Minor, Antioch in southern Turkey and Alexandria in Egypt.
Circa 300 BCE, a Seleucid king “had all the books in the world burned because he wanted the calculation of time to begin with himself”—according to Luciano Canfora’s The Vanished Library, translated by Martin Lyle, University of California Press, 1987, p. 183.
In the process of consolidating its hold over the Italian peninsula, Rome annihilated the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Aequi and the Volsci—all of them fully developed urban civilizations. In 278 BCE, invading Celts sacked Delphi, Greece. At the time, the Temple at Delphi was the Greek equivalent of Fort Knox, the Ivy League colleges and the Library of Congress combined.
The Alexandria Library burned down in 272 BCE during a war between another Roman Emperor and a rebellious Queen whose famous capital, Smyrna, he sacked. The Romans took Syracuse by assault in 211 BCE. They killed the mathematician Archimedes among many other inhabitants.
In 255 BCE, King Ashoka acceded to the Mauryan throne of India. He renounced military aggression and emphasized the welfare of his subjects in accordance with standard Buddhist beliefs: a first and last in world history. He planted his admirable policies on stone stele throughout his empire. He will speak to you directly from his own chapter of Learners.
The great city of Epirus was sacked by Rome in 167 BCE. Rome captured the Macedonian Royal Library at Pella in 168 BCE. Balkh, the Bactrian capital, fell to the Parthian and Sakan nations in the 2nd century BCE. Rome allied with Sparta in 146 BCE (big surprise) to destroy Corinth. Another Seleucid King destroyed Beirut, the last Phoenician homeport, in 140 BCE. Fregellae, second largest city in Italy, was destroyed by Rome in 124 BCE. So was Roman Florentia (Florence) in 88 BCE. Rome sacked Athens bloody and partially burned it down in 86 BCE. Its Emperor expropriated the Athenian Apelliconte’s library. That content disappeared when the Emperor’s profligate son sold it to satisfy his creditors, according to A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes, Henry Holt, New York, 1995, p. 66.
The last cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia date from 75 BCE (probably inscribed in corrupt Sumerian). That area was once a breadbasket of civilization and was said to have been the original site of Eden. It is now a baked-clay wasteland called Iraq. Centuries of excess population overworked the soil with imperial aspirations and easily taxable herds of goats that ate everything down to the roots.
Edward Hyams, in Soil and Civilization, Thames and Hudson, London, New York, 1952, pp. 33-40, states that stock-raising nomadism and patriarchy arose on parklands of high-loess soil; whereas tillage, permanent settlement and matriarchal systems originated on alluvial soils. He concluded that the democratic principles of Athens were based on its poor soils and its cultivation of olives and grapes for luxury export in exchange for wheat and other commodities grown overseas; whereas Sparta’s slave system was based on thick alluvial soils and homegrown wheat crops. Sorta like the difference between flinty New England soil and canny tradesmen, versus the black lowland soil and slaveholding elites of the Deep South. He said that one of the characteristics of a warfare society is that it exhausts the native soil – a word to the wise.
The only thing more destructive of nature than a goat is a car. The only thing more destructive than both: that would be man. The latest and most accurately placed site for the Garden of Eden is the Valley of Tabriz in Iran, now a polluted industrial wasteland of the kind we mass produce worldwide.
Caesar destroyed every independent Gaelic town; he had over a million Gauls murdered. Caesar slandered and exterminated the Druids as well. In 48 BCE, the inhabitants of Alexandria blockaded him. Proud Alexandria was the capital of Egypt and the foremost library city of the Western world. If Rome was the seat of Power, Alexandria was that of Reason. For centuries, every merchantman docking in Alexandria Harbor had to hand over its documents to the Library in exchange for clean copies. Caesar allowed the library’s Museum to burn down. Shiploads of choice texts also burned, which he had personally selected for delivery to Rome, as well as the Library docks. The whole facility along with its attached research institute, the Mouseion (shrine of the muses), may have burned down; who knows? Modern historians argue that the Library had no physical contact with the docks—this despite the fact that every passing merchantman had to swap everything from ship’s logs to tourist paperbacks in exchange for hand-written copies?
As a historical writer, Caesar specialized in making himself look good at the expense of his victims. He spread equivalent mayhem in Spain. He led a succession of Roman oppressors whose stupid cruelties were surpassed only by their replacements’ and by that of the Roman Senate that dispatched them. Sound familiar, fellow Americans? Brilliant exceptions were two governors whose massacres were followed with leniency. This novel approach brought peace after decades of blind punishment had protracted the Spanish revolt. Contrary to standard propaganda (like Shakespeare’s version of Julius Caesar), the Roman Senate never defended freedom against reactionary tyrants. On the contrary, the Senate protected its criminal privileges against all comers. It bowed to any tyrant as long as he promised to steal his wealth from the poor. Wherever it went, Rome supported the wealthy and the powerful over the poor and the weak.
Caesar, in his day, was the closest thing Rome ever got to a progressive politician. He dared to tax Senatorial corruption and died thereby. He realized – like many tyrants before and since – that the most powerful weapon technologies encourage an iron aristocracy of military talent. Flabbier, hereditary Conspiracies of Greed like the Roman Senate of the Late Republic in decline, evolved second-rate military technologies. They wound up being even more expensive to maintain than the first-rate ones, and doomed to defeat, civil war and military chaos in the long run. Thus, their Decline and Fall—and ours soon to come if we don’t straighten out.
In 40 BCE, Anthony sent to his lover Cleopatra in Alexandria the entire library of its archrival, Pergamum (where parchment was invented). In part, he was punishing the Pergamumites for siding with his rivals during the latest Roman civil war. He may also have intended to compensate Cleopatra for Julius’ unrecorded act of vandalism.
Rome destroyed and rebuilt many cities; it uprooted homegrown cultures and scattered their populations elsewhere, more or less at random. Rome was an insignificant contributor to library scholarship. It specialized in villa libraries for the rich. No scholars were assembled when Rome established its first Public Library in 33 BCE, unlike centuries of common practice in the ‘decadent’ East. The Romans sacked Thebes in 29 BCE, ending its thousand-year era of prosperity.
The next two millennia are covered in the following chapter: Burning Libraries (AD).
The 3rd millennium is up to us—God help us.
Dates listed hereafter are Christian Era (CE)
unless noted otherwise. Please consult “Burning Libraries (BC)” for a list of
prior atrocities and a preamble to this nauseating topic.
The Book of Mormon proclaims that Christ carried His teachings around the world. It is written therein that He went to what would become Latin America (?) where mighty Judeo-Christian empires originated from a boatload of Israelite refugees. These Christian civilizations are said to have flourished for centuries and then degenerated into prehistoric obscurity. A book of encoded golden pages, since lost, revealed this chronicle to the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Could its contents have been forecasts of our (the European New World’s) eventual colonization, fundamentalist betrayal of Christianity and self-destruction?
Others conclude that Jesus received Buddhist instruction during a youthful pilgrimage to Kashmir in India. Recall the twenty-plus year gap in His biblical biography. It has also been said that he went to Britain as a boy with his uncle to visit Cornish tin mines and in Egypt to study ancient scriptures. He is also said to have lived to a ripe old age in Kashmir after his disciples spirited His comatose body away from itchy-fingered Roman executioners.
The giant library at Antioch burned down in 37 along with its city. Before her defeat, native Queen Boadicea burned down Roman Londinium (London) in 50. Three quarters of Rome burned down in 64. Rome conquered Jerusalem in 63 and flattened it in 70. In 68, the Romans annihilated Qumran, the Jewish Essene community that guarded the Dead Sea Scrolls. It massacred the inhabitants of Caesurae Palestinae (a beautiful and very rich artificial harbor), Jotapata and Massada (the Jews’ last stand fortress) by 73. Subsequent revolts targeted Jewish colonies in the great imperial cities (a lot of ‘decadent, cosmopolitan sophisticates’ as usual). This massacre cost the Roman Empire hundreds of thousands more lives and equivalent treasure. Rome conquered the island of Anglesey in 78, the last known refuge of the Druids.
Eighty CE saw the first destruction of one of the greatest Buddhist centers, Anuradhapura in Ceylon. Founded in 437 BCE, it would be annihilated by Tamil invaders during the 8th century CE, this time for good.
During the first four hundred years of the Christian era, the city of Rome (and, by inference, every other metropolis worldwide) suffered about eleven major fires every decade. A major fire was one that involved public buildings and entire residential districts. This, from Johan Goudsblom’s Fire & Civilization, Allen Lane, London, 1992. Doubtless, crowded wooden cities were naked to fire—at least until the 19th century when Europeans introduced masonry construction and mechanized fire brigades. The City of Rome had organized firemen; but like a lot of unemployed rural residents nowadays, they tended to start fires so they could get paid to put them out.
In the first two centuries CE, the Cushan invaded, settled and administered a Golden Age of Buddhism in Northern India under the title Guptas. The Gupta civilization burned out while stopping White (Caucasian) Hun invaders during the 5th century. Several dynastic orders contended for imperial control of Southern and Central Asia, until devastating Muslim invasions rolled through from 1000 to 1400.
China’s capital, Ch’ang-an (population: one million), burned down in 24. Pan Ku and his sister, Pan Chao, compiled the Han Shu (History of the Han) circa 70. They began a long tradition of including a bibliography in every dynastic history. Unfortunately, three library catastrophes nullified further Han progress. Lo-yang, the Han capital, burned down circa 200. More books were lost when government functionaries fled back to Ch’ang-an. It burned down in turn in 208. Lao-tse, the founder of Taoism, was Court Archivist under the Chou c. 220. Nearly four hundred years of the Warring States Period (220-581) destroyed most Chinese collections. In his Lang Huan Chi, Chang Hua (232-300) laments a vast imaginary library filled with precious ancient manuscripts lost to history. By 279, the Western Tsin Dynasty’s catalog totaled 30,000 volumes.
The Huns had been held out of China beyond the Great Wall’s fortifications for six centuries. They finally broke through and pillaged the Chin capitals, Loyang and Ch’ang-an, in 312. Their destructive dominion lasted until 581. The Liang Dynasty built up a 140,000-volume collection. Unfortunately but predictably, that library burned down in 554. A giant Buddhist grotto library was built in Hopei during the Six Dynasties Period from 221 to 589. Over the next thousand years, this collection accumulated many Confucian classics by incising them in raw stone on the cave’s walls. A similar facility was established next to the National Academy.
Circa 600, Niu Hung wrote a memorandum to the Sui Emperor about the destruction of previous libraries. He suggested that imperial collections should be augmented by copying private books. The Chia-tse palace accumulated 370,000 volumes by following this new policy. In 605, the Chinese emperor, Liu Fang, sacked Indrapura, the Cham capital. From 754, when the population of China was about fifty-three million; it fell to seventeen million by 764.
Two key texts on Japanese history disappeared, the Kokki (National Record), during the Isshi (Itsushi) Incident in 645, and the Tennoki at some later date.
In 758, Arabs and Persians sacked Canton. The Tibetans invaded Chang-an in 763. A British collector bought a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra dating from 868, at Tun-huang in 1907. It is the oldest known printed book. Many Buddhist sects acknowledge that title as their supreme text.
In 907, building materials from the ruins of Ch'ang-an were rafted to build the new capital, Kaifeng. The Chinese invented printing presses around the same year. Guttenberg’s imitation press wouldn’t startle Europe awake until 1454. In 978, the Chinese imperial library held 80,000 volumes. Universal civil service examinations petrified Mandarin dominion over China from 960 until the Communist overthrow of Manchurian Mandarins in the late 1940’s and perhaps even today.
Actually, the loss of Chinese technological superiority can be laid at the hooves of the Mongol Horde and its ninety-year suppression of Chinese culture, followed by centuries of mixed rule that slavishly imitated the Mongols in military tyranny and technological backwardness, if nothing else. Sorta like African tyrants imitating the brutality of their White colonial predecessors.
The Song Renaissance (circa 1200) produced a fountainhead of peaceful creativity and a shortage of weapon capability. For the next seven centuries, various dynasties, both Chinese and foreign-born, would make sure that no such vulnerability reoccurred by suppressing Chinese creativity. Paradoxically, as usual, the suppression of peace technology brought an equivalent standstill in new weapon development. In attempting to strengthen China militarily, those dynasties only succeeded in weakening it to the verge of total helplessness. Having recently recovered from that cultural disaster, the re-emergent Han are about to show off their stunning intellectual potential once again within the next few decades.
Internal chaos destroyed half the books in various imperial libraries by the end of Hsuan Tsung’s reign c. 1000. Under T’ang leadership, both private and monastic libraries flourished for a while. During the Northern Sung period, which lasted until 1126, the Chung-wen Hall was established in modern K’ai-feng. This library contained 6,705 works in 73,877 volumes. The Chin destroyed it when they took over.
For millennia, military expeditions dispatched from the Middle Kingdom raked foreign tribes, cities, libraries and monasteries along its expanding frontier. The Tibetans fought back; they occupied the Chinese capital Ch’ang-an in 763. They had been Chinese vassals before, would see their Drigung Temple burned down by a Chinese army in 1290, and would be re-annexed in 1720. Chinese occupiers torment the Tibetans and wreck their civilization as we speak.
Kublai Khan abandoned his Mongol capital, Karakorum, in favor of Peking. In the mid-1300’s, vengeful Chinese destroyed Karakorum. The Mongols sacked and burned Pagan, capital of Burma (founded in 849) in 1287. The Shans would do so in 1299, permanently this time. In the 13th century, Mongol chieftains consolidated every library their Chinese slaves implored them to spare and shipped the lot to Peking. This collection expanded over the next seven centuries, as did others in China. Serious damage resulted from the mid-1640 Manchu takeover, when Nanking, Peking, Fukien and Canton changed hands several times.
There followed the horrific Taiping rebellion with its twenty million dead (the concurrent American Civil War killed 600,000 in the worst war Americans have ever known). Then two Opium Wars against the London/Boston Drug Cartel. Believe it or not, this gang of thieves was led by Queen Victoria and backed by the Drug Lord financiers of Stanford University and America’s trans-continental railroads. In pursuing its brain-dead War on Drugs, the DEA should confiscate those structures and auction them off to support its habit.
During the Boxer rebellion, European, American and Japanese armies sacked the Imperial Residence in Peking’s Forbidden City. Thereafter, a couple of Sino-Japanese Wars would reduce Chinese libraries by three quarters. Finally, Americans bankrolled the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War. This inept policy culminated in their evacuation to Taiwan. Mao Tse Tung was a library assistant at one time.
Back to ‘Europe’ around the year zero. Another Roman Emperor, Vespatian, celebrated his son’s destruction of Jerusalem by inserting a public library in the Forum he had built circa 70. The Octavian library was destroyed in 80. Emperor Domitian (81-96) had many wrecked libraries rebuilt—one of his several desperate and ruinous reconstruction decrees. Seeking disappeared works, he dispatched emissaries to copy unique originals in Alexandria. The fortunes he spent rebuilding civilization went wanting for mercenary armies, who proceeded to tear out, cut down and burn to ashes all his efforts at reconstruction.
In 105, Rome destroyed the four-century-old Dacian Empire’s capital, Sarmizegetusa, in what is now Romania. Roman deserters manned the last bastions of resistance. In the same way, Irish deserters from the American Army fought to the last when the U.S. invaded Mexico. Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers served the U.S. Army in Mexico as Gestapo agents.
In the 2nd century, the most famous western libraries were Como and Tivoli in Italy, Tripoli in Lebanon and Timgad in Algeria. The Berbers destroyed this last city during the 7th century. Each of these cities was fought over, sacked and eventually reduced to a dusty backwater. In 130, the Romans erected Aelia Capitolina on the sixty-year-old ruins of Jerusalem. Rome sacked the Persian capital city, Seleucia, in 165. The Palatine library was destroyed circa 190. In 196, Septimus Severus captured rebellious Byzantium; he burned it down, rebuilt it, (a common Roman practice) and renamed it Antoninia after his wife. In 197, the Gaelic commercial center of Lugdunum (Lyons) was sacked during another Roman civil war. Only recently has it recovered its famous prosperity. Rome sacked Ctesiphon, capital of rival Persia, in 198. It re-looted Syracuse in 216.
An earthquake toppled the Colossus of Rhodes – another Wonder of the World – in 224 BCE. Erected fifty years earlier, it had stood 100 feet tall. It was so superbly crafted, ships were said to make harbor between its outstretched feet. This is assumed to be an impossible feat of engineering—what, another impossible feat of ancient engineering? The city of Rhodes was damaged by the earthquake, both physically and spiritually. Surviving inhabitants refused Egyptian king Ptolemy III’s offer to finance the reconstruction of that famous statue of Helios, their patron sun god.
Bishop Alexander established the Latin Library in Jerusalem. Around that time, Origen & Pamphilus created a large library in Caesarea, now a ruin. Heruli Goths sacked Philipolis in 250. Shapur I of Persia sacked Antioch twice in 256. Meanwhile, busy Goths burned down Ephesus in 262. Ephesus was the New York City of Asia at that time. Its temple of Diana (Artemis) was another Wonder of the World. It held the third greatest library in the Western World, after those of Alexandria and Pergamum. As noted earlier, it had already been burned down at least once. They went on to sack Chalcedon, Nice, Pruse, Apanda, Cius, Athens Corinth, Sparta, Argos, Nicomedia and many other cities from 265 to 277.
Alexandria endured fifteen years of civil war, famine and plague from 250 to 265. Another Roman Emperor suppressed a revolt in Alexandria in 272 (with untold damage to the Library). He defeated the Goths and Alemanni and then sacked Palmyra in 273. Franks destroyed Syracuse around 280. Another Roman Emperor suppressed another Alexandrine revolt and sacked the town in 295. Bursis and Coptos were sacked under his orders. In 298, he ordered all Christian texts burnt, churches destroyed and worship outlawed.
This massive purge probably cancelled the last opportunity to chronicle Christ’s life accurately.
The library at Antioch burned down once again in 363 along with the rest of the city. Sometime between 300 and 500, the city of Ubar, the primary desert way station for the incense caravans of Arabia, collapsed into a sinkhole. Mohammed offers its destruction as a lesson to the unfaithful.
In 365 Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia and Greece were inundated by a tsunami that an oceanic earthquake drove two miles inland. Fifty thousand people died in Alexandria alone. In 367, the Bishop there ordered Egyptians to burn all non-canonical religious writings. The Nag Hammadi heretical texts (rediscovered in 1945) were survivors of this holocaust. A Roman Emperor commanded the mass incineration of all non-Christian books in 373, the year the Castillians burned down Lisbon. A Christian mob led by the archbishop of Alexandria destroyed its Serapeum (Temple of Serapis) in 391. That was the same year a Byzantine Emperor ordered that every pagan temple be razed. In 401, the final version of Ephesus’ Temple of Artemis was destroyed by order of St. John Chrysostom.
Some historians attribute the next thousand years’ Dark Age to these alternating acts of Christian and Pagan fanaticism. You can’t stage a respectable Dark Age without burning all the books beforehand.
The Vandals sacked Rheims, Amiens, Arras and Tournai around 406. They sacked and nearly destroyed Marsala, a prosperous Sicilian city that was nearly 800 years old in 440. Visigoths stormed and sacked Rome in 410, a feat the Vandals reprised in 455.
A Chinese Army chased the Huns from their steppe homeland in 91, all the way across Asia to Europe. The Huns dealt similar destruction to everyone they encountered from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean around 450. Except for Paris and Rome, the western and southern limits of Attila’s raids.
St. Cyril of Alexandria led his monks to mob, torture and kill Hypatia, a Neo-Platonist philosopher renowned for her wisdom and beauty. The Persians sacked Miletus in 494 and Amida in 502. Another Christian zealot, the Emperor Justinian, closed the thousand-year-old University of Athens in 529, thus ending Neo-Platonism and its research in reincarnation. The Byzantines attempted and failed to conquer Persia, then they failed to retake the Western Roman Empire from the barbarians. All they really managed to accomplish was to gut almost every city in North Africa, Italy, Armenia and Anatolia.
Nanjing was destroyed by fire in 589. That same year, the Benedictines founded the Monastery of Monte Casino. St. Benedict, their patron, loathed scholarship. Despite his bias, it became another great library after his death. Destroyed by the Lombards in 585, by Saracens in 884, by Normans in 1046 and by an earthquake in 1349, it would be leveled by American bombers during World War II. The Franks sacked Tarragona, the Roman capital of Spain, during the 5th century CE.
Antioch was another great library city on Turkey’s southern shore. Catastrophic earthquakes (the one in 526 killed 250,000 inhabitants) alternated with a succession of military sacks (by Persians in 538 and 611, Arabs in 637, Seljuk Turks in 1085, Crusaders in 1098, Mamelukes of Egypt in 1268 and Ottoman Turks in 1516) to reduce this magnificent center of commerce and learning into a provincial backwater. The Library of Rome burned in 535; it was a total loss in 546.
Massive earthquakes and plagues wracked the world around 543; they halved Europe’s population within fifty years. By 550, the crucifix had become a fashionable Christian ornament. It’s strange how nature-tormented Christians learned to decorate their bodies with this idolatrous and shadistic jewelry. Circa 600, Pope Gregory I (The Great, as usual) burned down the library of Palatine Apollo. The Persians sacked Damascus in 614 and Jerusalem in 615, then again in 619. Vyadhapura, Hindu Funan capital of the first Khmer kingdom, was taken over by the Chenla in the 7th century.
The list of towns Muslims captured with varying degrees of destruction includes but is not limited to Pella, Damascus, Homs and Emesa in 635; Palmyra, Petra and the six sophisticated desert cities of the Nabateans wiped out in 636. The Muslims took Ctesiphon in 637. They finally destroyed Persia’s official state religion, Zoroastrianism. Imagine the book-burning parties they must have held! Ibn Khaldun wrote:
“Umar wrote [to the local Muslim commander who had requested
permission to distribute these books to his troops as booty]: ‘Throw them into
the water. If what they contain is right
guidance, God has given us better guidance.
If it is error, God has protected us against it.’” The Muqaddimah:
An Introduction to History, Franz Rosenthal, translator, Bollingen Series, Princeton
University Press, 1967, p. 373.
Jerusalem fell in the wake of this destruction, then Tripoli and Antioch in 638, Aleppo in 639, Caesarea and Gaza in 640, Babylon in 641, Ascalon in 644, and Tripoli again in 645. Nanking in China was destroyed in the 690’s.
In Alexandria in 642, Arab conquerors found 700,000 volumes. “Enough kindling to heat Alexandria’s baths for six months.” Umar again – Mohammed’s first Successor and Caliph of the Faith – declared that all necessary knowledge could be found in the Koran and any knowledge outside the Koran must be pernicious.
Sound familiar? Fundamentalists cannot be told apart, regardless of their religion, date of birth or mother race. Their mothers must have loved them, nonetheless…
The list goes on. Cyrene and Tripoli, which the Muslims took in 643; rebellious Alexandria again in 645 (ending its manuscript exchange once-and-for-all); Cyprus in 649; Rhodes in 654; Kabul in 664, 708 and 1504; Bokhara in 674 and 710; Samarkhand (where Chinese craftsmen taught Muslims the art of paper-making) in 676 and 711; Carthage in 698; Gibraltar, Lisbon (burned) and Toledo in 711; Samarkhand again in 712; Khwarizm, Ferghana, Tashkent and Kashgar in 713; Multan in 715; Lisbon in 717; Narbonne in 719; Seville in 721 (where the Western Gothic King Isidor’s library was destroyed); Carcassonne and Nimes in 726; Bordeaux (burned down) in 732; Derbent in 733; Samarkhand, once and for all, in 737 or 738. The Franks took Narbonne back from the Muslims in 759. Palermo, Sicily fell to them in 831, independent Capua in 840, Bari in 841. It would prosper as a Muslim stronghold until 1062 when the Pisans sacked it, then 1072 when the Normans took it and rebuilt it as their Sicilian capital.
The monastery at Lindisfarne was the missionary center of the Celtic Church. Vikings sacked it at the end of the 8th century – a forewarning of escalating Viking raids into Britain. Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 751. In 756, the Briton capital Alcluith was captured by the Picts.
The Haeinsa temple, established in 802 near the Korean city of Taegu, contains 80,000 printing blocks engraved with Buddhist scriptures dating from the 13th century.
The Javanese invaded Anam and Champa in 774. In 832, the Pyu capital, Sri Kshetra, was destroyed during a Thai raid led by Nanchao. Escaping northwards, its urban population was eventually taken captive by the Mon. Beneficiaries of trade between India and the rest of Southeast Asia, the Pyus were the most peaceful people in the region. They punished rare crimes with great leniency and held democratic elections for their leaders. Boys and girls went to Buddhist schools until they were twenty, establishing a custom of near-universal literacy in Burma ever since. They were so non-violent, they would not make silk because that involved killing silk worms.
In 807, Muslim raiders plundered Rhodes; in 840, they sacked Rome. Savage Kyrgyz Turks destroyed the Uighur capital city of Karablagasun during the same year. In later centuries, surviving Uighur exiles would serve the Mongols as mercenary scholars (a well-paid, perilous and seldom mentioned honor).
In 871, ex-slaves destroyed Basra. Arab Muslims fought each other and the Turks to the death. At first, they did so as Northern and Southern Arabs, later as Shia and Sunni sectarians. Together, they sacked many Muslim towns including Basra in 923, Kufa in 925 and Mecca in 929. I doubt that Mohammed would have approved.
The Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius (c. 820-891) compiled his Bibliotheca, an account of two hundred eighty earlier texts. It is a valuable reference source for many lost works.
In 846, a Muslim army from Cordoba sacked Leon; another sacked Rome and burnt St. Peters. In 878, Muslims conquered Syracuse. In 985, Muslims burned Barcelona and then Leon in 988. In 976 al-Mansur, the new regent for the child Caliph of Cordoba,
“… proceeded to the library of al-Hakam [his father, the
ex-Caliph], caused all the writings therein contained to be brought forth in
the presence of a number of theologians and ordered these latter to put on one
side, with the exception of medical texts and treatises on arithmetic, all
those books dealing with the sciences of the ancients: logic, astronomy and
other sciences cultivated by the Greeks.
When these had been separated from all the books relating to
lexicography, grammar, poetry, history, medicine, jurisprudence, traditions, in
short those sciences recognized by the Andalusians, Ibn Abi ‘Amir commanded
that the works treating of the ancient sciences should be burned. Some were in fact committed to the flames;
others were flung into the palace moats, or buried, or destroyed in some other
manner. Ibn Abi ‘Amir acted in this
fashion in order to ingratiate himself with the people of al-Andalus and to
discredit in their eyes the principles followed by al-Hakam. Indeed, these sciences were ill regarded by
the older generation and criticized by the leading men. The majority of those then engaged in the
study of philosophy lost their ardor and kept secret what they knew of these
sciences, only cultivating openly the branches permitted them, such as
arithmetic, the rules governing the partition of inheritances, medicine and the
like.” Arnold
Toynbee, ed., Cities in History, McCraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1973, p.
177.
Around the year 999, the same year he murdered his brother, Mahmud of Ghazni destroyed the Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva at Somnath in Gujarat. Then he burned the famous library of the Fatimids in Bokhara. He may have advertised himself as a patron of the arts, but in reality he was just another two-bit religious fanatic. He built the Celestial Bride Mosque in Ghazni. Christian Barcelona sacked Cordoba in 1010. Muslims raided Pisa in 1011: their last big raid into Italy. In 1013, Berber rebels seized and sacked Cordoba wracked by internal unrest. Al-Mansur’s palace and carefully censored library were utterly destroyed. In 1071 Seljuk Turks took Jerusalem from the Fatimid Muslims, then they fought each other among its ruins.
Between 1014 and 1018, Byzantine Basil II attacked Bulgaria. Victorious in battle, he had 15,000 prisoners blinded and then ordered this grim procession sent home: one man out of every hundred got to keep one eye intact to guide the others. The Bulgarian King threw himself from his own battlements when he beheld this sorry remnant of his army stumble home. That same year, the Poles took Kiev.
In 1019, a Liao army was driven out of Koryo (Korea). King Anawratha (1044-1077) was the founder of the Myanmar (Burmese) empire. He ‘rescued’ the Pegu half of the Mon kingdom from a Khmer raid and then took over the Thaton half, taking home to Pagan thirty sets of the Buddhist canon (Tripitaka), about 30,000 Mon monks and artisans and the captive king of Pegu. Though the Mons dominated Burmese culture for two centuries thereafter, it was a love-hate relationship based on military dominance, on the one hand, and cultural superiority on the other. Koryo built a wall from sea to sea in 1044.
Seljuk Turks captured Ceasarea in 1067; in 1076 they sacked Jerusalem (thus inciting the Crusades). In the same year, Almoravid fanatics took the salt and gold trading center of Kumbi. They massacred its pagan majority and imposed Islam on the Kingdom of Ghana. Kumbi endured a succession of invaders and reformers until it collapsed in 1240; a Soso chief sacked it in 1203. Norman allies of Pope Gregory VII sacked Rome in 1084. By 1102, the Muslims had taken every town in Portugal, and in Spain up to Valencia. The Christians besieged and retook Toledo in 1085. Portugal would not be entirely regained for Christianity until 1147; Spain, until 1340. After which the Christians would fight among themselves for another century. Or longer? The Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s ate up another million victims. In 1162, Frederick I Barbarossa (Redbeard) destroyed Milan.
The library of Banu Ammar, the greatest library in Syria, was scattered and destroyed during the sack of Tripoli by Genoese marines in 1109. This destruction was mirrored in that of many rich cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean -- including Jerusalem, Caesarea and on the very rich island of Cyprus (thanks to Richard the Lionheart) -- during the Crusades (1096 to 1291: eight major expeditions and many minor ones during which a million Europeans and uncounted Muslims, Jews and native Christians died as a result of combat).
In 1170, Seljuk Turks destroyed the Armenian library in Syunik with its 10,000 manuscripts. In 1171, the Kurdish Sunni Saladin (Salah-al-din Yousouf) annihilated the Shia Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo along with many of its libraries; he retook Jerusalem for Islam by 1187, as well as many other Crusader towns. Conquering Sicily and Italy in a series of complicated and bloody wars, the Normans took Bari, Tripoli, Mahadia, Malta and Corfu. They sacked Athens, Corinth and Thebes from 1146 to 1152.
The Muslim invasion of Hindu India induced massive mortality and destruction. Battles and subsequent massacres occurred at Peshawar in 1008, Thaneswar in 1014, Kanauj in 1018, (the University of Nalanda was destroyed in 1183), Lahore in 1186, Kathiawar in 1023, and Tarawari in 1191. In 1192, 120,000 Muslims demolished the Hindu temples at Ajmer. Delhi fell in 1193, Benares in 1194, Badaun and Kannauj in 1195, Kalinja in 1202, Magadha and Bengal from 1201 to 1203. In 1234, Chahadadeva captured Narwar from the Muslims. The Yadava capital Devagiri fell in 1294, Ramthanbor in 1301, Chitor in 1303, most of the Deccan by 1311, Kabul in 1504, Agra and Delhi in 1525 and Talikot in 1564. From the 13th to the 19th century, cruel Moslem rulers destroyed a hundred Hindu temples dedicated to Shiva in the pilgrimage city of Benares alone.
Usually, they erected mosques over the ruins—the way Christian evangelicals built churches over pagan ruins, and Communists built community centers over Christian ruins, at gunpoint. This has been an endless source of friction since, from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to most cities in Northern India. After all, what the Muslims got away with at sword-point a thousand years ago, they’re not about to permit anyone to do to them today. And it has never occurred to any of these fanatics – Muslim, atheist or otherwise – that inviting Allah into a building and ejecting Shiva from the same building, or inviting the Christian God and evicting the Gods of old, is the same as rejecting every version of God including one’s own.
God has more patience than I do with silly humans nit-picking each other to death over their contradictory, restrictive, and yammering definitions of God’s infinite, immeasurable and limitless love.
The Kingdom of East Java was destroyed in 1017. Tangut, Khmer, Mon, Chola (who invaded Malayu in 1025) Viet, Burmese, Srivijaya, Annamese and Champa civilizations fought one another across every portion of the Asian mainland that Turks, Mongols and Muslims had spared. Equivalent massacres blossomed in the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. Many islands contained one or more warring tribes and city-states. Like most societies, they destroyed each other’s citadels and libraries at every opportunity.
Great Novgorod, the seat of the Russian state under the Viking Rurik, was established in 862. It repulsed attacks from Teutonic and Livonian Knights, from the Swedes and the Mongols. It was taken by Ivan III of Moscow and laid waste by Ivan IV. The Uzbeks took Meshed, holy Shiite city, in 1582. Moscow burnt down in 1570; there were 200,000 dead. Khiva was destroyed in 1603, Karakorum in 1688.
The Lombards, Marcomanni, Gepidae, Heruli, Vandals, Avars, Burgundi, Helvetii, Teutons, Alans, Franks, Saxons, Goths, Huns, Vikings, Magyars and Pechnegs formed a host of killer swarms. Thanks to them, no city, monastery or library in Eurasia and North Africa survived the decline of Roman power and the onset of Christianity. Just like nowadays, civilization was on the verge of total annihilation at the hands of born-again Huns who retained just enough familiarity with true civilization to destroy it.
Charlemagne could barely read and he couldn’t write. He took hostage almost every educated nobleman in Europe, then he had most of them killed to secure his hold over the Empire. He destroyed the independent commercial center of Fiume on the Adriatic. Circa 800, he and his mentor, Alcuin, had to recruit clerical volunteers from the four corners of the cramped Catholic world: (North Africa, Rome, Ireland and Byzantium) to reteach noble orphans their forgotten ABC’s. His grandson, Charles the Bald, was a bibliophile. He created his own library and added to the Palace’s. Both libraries disappeared after his death. Abbey libraries were established at Tours, Cluny, Corvey and Fulda (the military chokepoint of Germany). Like most ‘great’ libraries of this period, they boasted a few hundred volumes at most—and all of them perished. Nearly all of London burned down in 798.
Meanwhile, mead-soaked Vikings toasted each other from hollowed human skulls (from which the term Sköll!). They burned down Aachen and Cologne (Köln) around 800, sacked London, Cadiz and Pisa. They sacked the famous Monastery of Iona in 806, Clonmore in 836. The Danes took Dublin in 851. York, Canterbury with its Cathedral, London, Paris, Aix, Worms, Algerica and Toulouse, all these and lesser satellites succumbed by 861. Looting their way from the White Sea southwards along Russian rivers, Varengian Norsemen sacked Constantinople in 865. After this display of military prowess, they signed on as its mercenaries.
After an abrupt Roman evacuation, the backwater that was England absorbed centuries of raids, massacres and invasions by Celts, renegade Gallo-Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Irish, Jutes, Picts, Scots, Vikings and assorted barbarians. Alfred the Great of England staged a revival of Old English literature around 890.
In 978, the Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne’s heir apparent sacked Aix-la-Chapelle, Charlemagne’s coronation city. London burned down again in 982. Another Caliph destroyed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009. Oghuz Turks sacked Tabriz in 1029. Benares, India, was plundered by a Punjabi (Muslim) army in 1034. In 1084 the Normans sacked Rome. Am I repeating myself? Resurgent Christian crusaders massacred the populations of Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099.
Venice burned in 1106. Crusaders destroyed Tripoli’s thousand-year-old library during a siege in 1109. They sacked Christian Byzantium and destroyed its libraries in 1204. Pisa sacked Amalfi, Italy in 1135 and 1137. In 1151, the Persians burned down Chazni. In 1177, the Chams sacked Angkor Wat. Zimbabwe, capital of a mining empire intermittently rich since the 3rd century CE, was abandoned for unknown reasons during the 11th century. In 1184, the great Abbey at Glastonbury, site of one of the oldest Christian churches in Europe, (do you recall my mention of Jesus visiting Britain?) burned down along with all its sacred scriptures.
Constantinople and its libraries started up in 330. Its first Hagia Sophia (Church of Divine Wisdom) burned down in 360; the second, in 532. Around 475 a fire destroyed 120,000 volumes. This collection grew back to 600,000 volumes. In 551 the last Latin library in Constantinople was destroyed. Thereafter, collected works were written solely in Greek. A tidal wave crushed Beirut during the same year; it would it take another ten centuries to recover its prior glory.
Constantinople boasted a half million inhabitants, free bread, circuses and rudimentary medical care for the poor. Savage rioting between Blue (reactionary) and Green (radical) parties, however, accelerated the Empire’s decline. Actually, these mutual benefit societies opposed each other on every social issue including religion and politics, largely because they championed different sides during Hippodrome chariot races—another instance of sports enthusiasm run amok. This zero-sum patronage system – doling out minimal benefits after enormous military taxes had been paid – set its members tooth and nail against each other. Finally, the Imperial Guard waded into one of their worst riots and massacred all the Greens—the Blues were the Empress’ favorites. These ridiculous squabbles (reminiscent of the factional squabbling between interchangeable American Democrats and Republicans) caused a military disaster during the battle of Manzikert in 1071, during which the Seljuk Turks massacred the entire Byzantine army. This disaster befell the army even though it was at the height of its military power and was costing its civilian population a fortune to support. It happened largely because the top commanders were Green/Blue political fanatics and wouldn’t support each other during the battle.
In 1204 Frankish and Venetian Crusaders sacked Christian Constantinople and its libraries. In 1212 London burned down. In 1236 the Holy Roman Emperor burned down Vicenza. French Louis IX had the Talmud burned in Paris. In 1453 the Turks finally took Constantinople with grievous loss to life and property. Shiploads of books were evacuated to Venice and elsewhere, and from thence into oblivion. Later, the Turks destroyed Trebizond on the Black Sea: the last refuge of the ‘Roman’ emperors.
1453 was the year the Vatican established its own Library. The Catholic Pope hadn’t lifted a finger to save Greek Orthodox Constantinople from the Muslims. The Vatican Library is famous for having blacklisted unique manuscripts of Europe’s greatest works, on a Papal Index Librorum Prohibitorium (index of forbidden books, commonly called The Index). Papal suppression of rare knowledge stifled intellectual discourse for centuries—almost as effectively as our media-glut of commercial-based white noise does, today.
During the European Dark Ages, brilliant Muslim scholars guarded Koranic commentaries as well as some Greek and Roman thought. Abū ‘Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Arabic: أبو علي الحسن بن الحسن بن الهيثم, Latinized: Alhacen or (deprecated) Alhazen) (965 – 1039), wrote two hundred books, at least ninety-six scientific texts, of which more than fifty have survived in whole or in part. He is one of the originators of modern science.
Yet around 1100, a pious Muslim scholar concluded that ancient Greek texts led to “loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the creator.” In 1150, the latest Caliph set alight the enormous philosophical library of Baghdad (a relatively recent city, established in 762), saving onrushing Mongols the trouble. Actually, when the Mongols took Baghdad with near-total massacre of its inhabitants, its river Tigris was said to have run red with blood from the bodies thrown into it, then black with ink from the books treated likewise.
Some of these tidbits were taken from L. Sprague de Camp’s The Ancient Engineers, Dorset Press, 1963. A handful of enlightened Christians and Jews preserved the Old and New Testaments, as well as a few Talmudic and monastic commentaries. Anyone else’s thoughts – Persia’s Zoroastrian religion/bureaucracy and the Hellenized Buddhism of the Cushan – were extirpated without mercy.
Fundamentalist Taliban gangsters are putting the finishing touches to this task today. They’ve wrecked the last of countless Buddhist statues that once lined the Silk Road. Across the Mediterranean and South Asia, thousands of beautiful statues were destroyed or had their facial features gouged out―half by Christian iconoclasts and half by Muslim fanatics. I don’t think this vandalism had anything to do with Jesus’ or Mohammed’s teachings, and I doubt if either of them would have approved. Such vandalism makes religion look bad to civilized outsiders: just a bunch of snot-nosed, ignorant vandals. One should expect fewer conversions that way; and both Jesus and Mohammed were great believers in gathering as many converts as possible through peacemaking and noble generosity.
Constantinople was nearly spared from Turkish sack by the Mongols who conquered the largest contiguous empire in history. Calling themselves the Chin dynasty, Juchen Mongols destroyed the Sung capital, Kaifeng twice in 1126 and 1127. Nanking, the Southern Sung capital, fell to them in 1127. Nomad Mongols despised cities; they tended to level them on the run. Major cities sacrificed to the Mongols include but are not limited to: Peking and the Chinese cities north of the Yellow River, in 1215; Khojend, Otrar, Bokhara (which surrendered without a fight, but was destroyed anyway), and Samarkand in 1220; Zenjan, Ghazni, Gurganj, Nishapur, Merv, Balkh, Thalequan, Bamian, Ghulghuleh in 1221; Herat, Astrakhan and Sudak in 1222; Ninghsia in 1227; Tbilisi, Erivan and Baku between 1231 and 1236; many south central Chinese cities including Pien Liang (Kaifeng) in 1234; Moscow and Kaluga in 1237; Kiev in 1240; Cracow, Pest and Lahore in 1241; Nanchao, China in 1253; the major cities of Koryo, 1253-57; Hanoi in 1257; Baghdad in 1258 (see above).
A Khwarezmian army fled the Mongols in good order; it managed to sack Jerusalem in 1244. Mongols took Hanoi in 1257; they destroyed Maiyafarign; Alamut (where the great Persian historian and Mongol bureaucrat, ‘Ala ad-Din Juviani, persuaded the Mongol tyrant Hulägu to spare the precious Library of the Assassins (Isma’ilis); Baghdad in 1258; Cracow, Sandomir, Bythom and Sidon in 1259; Aleppo and Nablus in 1260; Mosul in 1262 (at the time, Mosul was world-famous for its beautiful paintings – typical patterns for mosque decoration, since – for its brilliant enamel and metalwork, and for the fabric muslin); Urgench, Khiva and Bukhara in 1273; Hangchow in 1276; Chaochow and Canton in 1278 and 1279 (exterminating heroic Sung resistance in China); Bhamo in 1283; Hanoi in 1285; Pagan and Hanoi, for the last time in 1287.
Shortly thereafter, the indomitable Annamese ejected the Mongols. Any amateur historian could have forewarned French, Japanese and American invaders of their eventual defeat by Vietnamese Nationalists. If only they’d bothered to listen. The Soviet invaders of Afghanistan, likewise. The only people who beat Alexander the Gross in a fair fight were Afghan Gypsies. The only people who stopped the Mongols on a battlefield were Egyptian Mamelukes and the Vietnamese, plus Indonesian and Japanese islanders. Of course, this victory wasn’t always good news. In 1291, the Mamelukes destroyed Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Haifa.
It was said that a comely virgin balancing a pitcher of gold on her head could walk the length of the Silk Road without fear of molestation – except, probably, by Mongol watchmen. For the first time in history, Marco Polo and his party could cross the length of Asia under one passport. Humans purchased this hyper-security with untold suffering and waste. How badly do we want to feel secure? This Highway to Hell became the transmission route of the Black Death.
The National Geographic Society published a beautiful, oversized book called Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World, 1983. One of that society’s countless informative, inexpensive and highly entertaining historical texts; not to mention the cheapest super-high qualify magazine in circulation, many issues of which contain beautifully drawn maps and posters. Bless them. This book’s three-foot by two-foot, full-folio title page contained a giant picture and the following caption on the next page:
“Afghan [camel] riders pick their way past the ruined
citadel now known as Shar-e-Gholgola, the ‘city of
screams.’ Once the seat of empire and a
lush, prosperous metropolis, the city fell before Mongol invaders in the 13th
century.”
Why do my daydreams torment me with equivalent images of a
‘planet of screams’: this desolate Earth?
Can’t we do better than that?
In 1081, Hiei monks burned down the monastery at Miidera. In 1113, 20,000 armed monks attacked Enryajuji. In 1165, Hiei monks burned the Hosso fortress in Kyoto. In 1193, Zen was prohibited in Japan. The Japanese stopped two Mongol invasions on their beaches, with a lot of help from kamikaze (Divine Wind) typhoons. Thereafter, the Japanese fought civil wars among themselves for centuries. Internally pacified by force, they launched the first of a series of viciously futile invasions of Korea. The Japanese drew inspiration for their Neo-Confucian religion, from books they stole from Korea’s ransacked libraries. In 1275, a major library was founded in Kanazawa (part of Yokohama), intending to collect every book written in Chinese and Japanese. Though diminished, it still exists.
The Mongols invaded Java by sea and burned its capital, Kediri or Daha, in 1293. Shortly thereafter, the Javanese expelled the Mongols. The Mamelukes destroyed Sis, Adana, Tarsus and Lajazzo in 1275. In 1303 Alexandria was flooded once again by a monstrous tidal ware.
The Egyptians destroyed Tripoli in 1289; the Muslims, Arbela in 1310. There followed the Mongol destruction of the Genoese Crimean colony of Kafa in 1308 (where and when the Black Plague was released into Europe through primitive germ warfare and commercial shipping); Kalinin in 1335; Herat in 1341; Kashgar in 1380; Herat again in 1381; Moscow in 1382; Fars in 1386; Karakorum in 1388; Smyrna and Baghdad again in 1393; Astrakhan and Serai in 1395; Delhi and Meerut in 1399; Aleppo and Damascus in 1400; Baghdad once again in 1401; Angora and Smyrna in 1402. Once the Mongols got going, nothing but a death in their own leadership and subsequent feuds could slow down their whirlwind of destruction.
Around 1405, the Turk/Mongol butcher Tamerlane unleashed more chaos across Central Asia than can be imagined. Also known as Timur the Lame, he was a devout Muslim and brilliant psychopath. He killed adherents of every creed with ecumenical gusto. His annihilation of Delhi cost over 80,000 lives; the city would take a century to recover. Hundreds of thousands of victims were butchered under Timur’s personal supervision. Meanwhile, he ordered the best artisans he could find to guild his magnificent capital, Samarkand. He spared Mosul from siege and rebuilt its pontoon bridge across the Tigris.
His city-kill credits include Balkh in 1370, Urgench in 1379, Abdizhan in 1375, Isfarian in 1381, Zaranj in 1383, Asterabad in 1384, Kars and Tiflis in 1386, Van and Ispahan (70,000 dead) in 1387, Tiflis in 1400, Baghdad (with 90,000 dead) in 1401. His rivals destroyed Moscow, Vladimir, Yriiel, Mozhaisk in 1382; and Tabriz in 1386. Tamerlane destroyed Azov in 1395; Astrakhan and Sarai in 1396; Multan and Talamba in 1398; Delhi and Miraj in 1399; Aleppo, Moma, Homs and Baalbek in 1400; Damascus in 1401; the Ottoman capital of Bursa, Smyrna (Izmir) and Sardis in 1402. Tamerlane died in Otrar on January 19, 1405; his tomb was protected by executing all its diggers. His death cut short his plan to annihilate Chinese civilization, once and for all, and turn its rotting skeleton into the pivot point for his conquest of the entire world.
Fourth Crusaders sacked Zara in 1202 and Thessalonica in 1204. These so-called crusaders destroyed every city and massacred everyone they encountered: Christian and otherwise, armed and otherwise, resisting and otherwise. Then they were massacred like a pack of wild dogs by the first real army of Muslims they met.
In the 1200’s, the Almohad Berbers – raging Muslim fundamentalists from Morocco – re-re-invaded Spain. Their Almoravid predecessors had already wrested Spain from Visigoth hegemons in 711. Resurgent Spanish Christians took advantage of this inter-Muslim strife to snuff out the most advanced society of the Middle Ages: the Islamic colonies of al-Andalus (Andalusia). The Pope authorized the Spanish Inquisition in 1238. Cardinal Jimenez, the Grand Inquisitor who succeeded bloody-handed Torquemada, burned 24,000 books in Grenada. From then on, Spanish conquerors would do their worst to snuff out each new civilization they encountered.
In Central America, Diego de Landa, the Bishop of Yucatan, patiently studied the literature of the Maya. Their records dated back to August 12, 3113 BCE. They had predicted that the world would end on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012. On that date, animals would find their voices, artifacts would come alive in men’s hands and they would unite to destroy mankind. This may be a likely outcome, when you think of it, of future bionanotechnology.
De Landa patiently taught himself High Mayan. Eventually, he earned the grudging respect of native elders, shamans and priests. They reverently brought him their last surviving copies for safekeeping. Once he believed he had captured the entire collection, he had everything burned. He substituted his own Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. Of thousands of hypothetical Maya texts, only a few survive today. Those survivors include the Dresden Codex, the Paris Codex (including the Popol Vuh and the Rabinal Achi), the Madrid Codex and a handful more. The Aztecs, their vassals and enemies (including the inhabitants of the 2000-year-old Zapotek city of Monte Alban) suffered a similar fate. So did the feuding Incas and their vassals in the Andes. So did every Indian nation in South and Central America. None survived except as miserable remnants. Many were completely exterminated.
Northern Europeans dealt equivalent Christian mercy to North American Indians.
Let’s set aside, for a moment, the grim British project to distribute smallpox-infected blankets to Indians they didn’t care for. The Canadian Government managed to dispossess its fewer but proportionately more menacing Native Indians almost peacefully—unlike genocidal bully/victim relationships perfected in the U.S.
They adopted two expedients: 1) they guaranteed native title in perpetuity to small tracts of land centered on each tribe’s most sacred ground, instead of shuffling crushed survivors onto reservations sited on more and more remote badlands; and 2) the Royal Canadian Mounted Police administered justice more or less equitably between the natives and settlers. In contrast, the U.S. hired glory-hound militarists, larcenous political appointees and bigot Christian fanatics to abuse Native Americans at gunpoint.
Only a few Amerindian nations were peaceable by nature. Oral traditions, archeological remnants and pictorial records tell their own story of intertribal warfare and even complete tribal and urban extermination in Meso-America. Population pressures largely drove it. The great urban civilizations of South and Central America succeeded each other in ascending order of blatant militarism and brutal sacrifice. Only the Six Nations of the Iroquois (the fiercest warriors in America) are on the record as having established an internally peaceful Confederacy. They tended to kick non-confederate butt until the Whites arrived with their diseases, firepower and overwhelming numbers. A few Native-American nations on the California coast were inherently peaceful. Perhaps predictably, their red and white neighbors mistreated them with equal enthusiasm. Apparently, Guarani Indians greeted the Spanish colonizers of Paraguay peacefully. What other native peoples were pacifists at heart and suffered annihilation or forced assimilation into more warlike tribes, no surviving records document.
By 400 CE, some unknown combination of catastrophes had destroyed the nearly two-thousand-year-old Olmec civilization. Meso-American urban society is traceable from 1500 BCE to about 600 BCE, at Chavin de Huantar in Northern Highlands of Peru. A city-site existed at San Loranzo, Tenochtitlan (ca. 1150-900 BCE); as well as its probable political successor, La Venta (c. 800-400 BCE). Both urban civilizations seem to have destroyed themselves, inexplicably.
Monte Alban was a mountaintop city that housed some 24,000 people. It declined in the 7th century. The city of Teotihuacán was the largest city in the New World: population 200,000, founded c. 300 CE. It destroyed itself with fires deliberately set between 700 and 750. More and more warriors appear in its final century’s art. Copan was the proud capital of the Maya race. Its ceremonial centers went back to c. 2000 BCE. It snuffed out, along with its satellite cities, between 830 and 930. An inspiration to the Maya was the Toltec capital of Tula or Tollan (35,000 inhabitants). It lost its ceremonial center to fire between 1150 and 1200. By 1300, the starving inhabitants of Tiahauanaco abandoned their Andean plateau. They’d inscribed it with giant mounded-pebble glyphs visible only from the air. The neighboring Huari Empire collapsed around the same time, c. 1000 CE.
Giant metropolises were abandoned, which once housed 100,000 people or more. Speculation about these disasters includes abrupt climate change (super-El Niños), irrigation-disrupting earthquakes, crop depletion, civil war, invasion, disease—even rabid vampire bat infestations and mass evacuation by extraterrestrials.
In North America, one could find advanced urban centers like Casas Grandes; the Hohokam, Chaco, Mogollon and Anasazi (Pueblo Bonito) cultures of the American Southwest; Mound People towns like the Hopewell complexes near the Great Lakes; and equivalent Mississippian towns like Cahokia near St. Louis. All of them may have traded with more southerly nations listed above. They also disintegrated, for a variety of mysterious reasons, by 1300.
Ani was the capital of the ancient Armenian state. An earthquake destroyed it during the 14th century. The same fate befell the Pharos of Alexandria. It was a lighthouse one hundred feet square at its base and two hundred feet tall, completed in 280 BCE. Apart from the Pyramids, it was the last survivor of the Seven Wonders of the World. Wrecked by earthquakes in 956 and 1303, and finished off in 1323, its remnants were camelled off as scrap bronze.
Berlin burned in 1405. Palembang, Sumatra was destroyed in 1407. Harfleur fell to the English in 1415. Its surrender initiated the 116-year “Hundred Years War” between France and England (1337-1453). In 1419, the Lesser Town of Prague was destroyed during interminable Hussite rebellions. Amsterdam burned in 1421 and again in 1453. Altenburg, Germany was burned by the Hussites in 1430. These heavily armed, wagon-borne heretics formed one of the first modern armies; nearly half of its combatants carried firearms, and many of its private soldiers were literate. Utraquist and Taborite (Hussite) sectarians ravaged Central Europe until 1452, when Prague fell once again and local nobles exterminated them.
The three main halls of Peking’s Forbidden City were destroyed by fire in 1421. Successive conflicts between Turkic and Mongol descendants (who were fanatical Muslim and Buddhist converts, respectively) destroyed Nishni Novgorod and Gorodites in 1408; Urgench in 1431; the Uzbeck capital Olugh-beg and Samarkand (whose famous porcelain tower was smashed) c. 1450; Sairam and Tashkent in 1451; Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde in 1502; Aksu, Jusha and Bai in 1514.
The Chams (Champa) raided the region of Angkor in 1177. It was the urbanized and intensively cultivated seat of Khmer power. The Cambodians counter-invaded in 1190. The Thais defeated the Khmers at Sukothai in 1238. They captured Ankhor Wat in 1353 and Angkor Thom in 1431. Those cities were finally abandoned just before 1450. In 1431, Tuaregs took and sacked Timbuktu, the two hundred year-old capital of the Mali Empire. In 1439, the Ottoman Turks took Semendia, the Serbian capital; in 1448 they took Herat. Spain took Naples in 1442. Circa 1450, the Annamese (Vietnamese) took, lost and retook the Champa, capital of Vijaya. The Tatars took Moscow in 1451. Thai Ayuthians took the Chiengmai capital (founded by the Thai King Mangrai after 1239) in 1452.
In 1453, the French retook Bordeaux. This ended the Hundred Years War and set loose thousands of routiers (rootiay, “roadies,” demobilized soldiers) to ravage the French countryside and torment its peasantry for decades to come. Immediately thereafter, the English fought the civil War of the Roses until 1485. Thereafter, the French fought out their Fronde (Sling) civil war.
Affluent Trebizond surrendered to Ottoman Turks in 1461; it never recovered from their abuse. Timbuktu was sacked by the Songhai in 1468. After decades of civil war, the Japanese Monastery at Honganji was destroyed in 1465. Civil war ravaged Kyoto from 1467 until 1477. Otranto, Italy, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1481. In 1482, the English took Edinburgh. Dresden burned in 1491.
During the 15th century, the Aztecs pulsed ever outward. Before 1325 CE, they had been a handful of sociopathic ‘chosen people.’ They were outcast by their victorious neighbors to two snake-infested swamp islets. By around 1430, they had destroyed their own chronicles to erase the bitter memory of their snake-eating past. By the time the Spaniards brought about their doom in 1518, they had become the most vicious imperialists in Mexico. They lashed out against their neighbors, more or less at random, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of Mexico. Aztec women were said to have been the most beautiful…
The Moscovites took Tver in 1485. In 1492, Granada fell to the Christians, ending Muslim occupation of Spanish territory. The Swedes sacked Ivangorod in 1496. Milan, Naples and other Italian cities fell repeatedly to French-led Renaissance invaders hired from all over Europe and then sent packing riddled with syphilis.
Uzbeks took Herat, Khorasan and Transoxiana c. 1500. In 1505, the Portuguese sacked Kilwa and Mombassa: the two greatest trade emporia of East Africa. They took Hormuz in 1508. These events marked the beginning of Europe’s conquest of the world. During this period, every center of world commerce would be sacked, burned and raked over (most several times), and almost every tribe and nation on Earth would be enslaved.
Anglo-Saxons love to condemn the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, when about 40,000 French elites were executed by vengeful French proletarians in three years. Tisk, tisk. How much more civilized we smug Anglo-Saxons are, compared to those rabid Frogs! Well, amphibians can’t catch rabies, but you get my point. They fail to mention the fact that it was a sorry year, since the 16th century, when less than 10,000 native elites weren’t massacred by European imperialists (including those hypocrite Brits and Americans, and, yes, the French too), somewhere around the globe.
I am of Irish descent; no English person has anything honest to tell me about the political massacre of subjected peoples.
Americans keep harping on how much more ‘civilized’ their Revolution was, compared to the French. Tell me, you flaming hypocrites, weren’t thousands of Loyalist American Tories killed in combat during the American Revolution, and many more forced overseas at gunpoint after the war? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Mombassa, capital of a vast African empire, burned down in 1508. In 1510, the Persians took Baku and Tabriz back from Tatars, and the Russians took Pskov. Don Affonce de Albuquerque sacked Goa for four days that same year; he boasted that he filled the mosques with Muslim citizens and then set them ablaze. A year later, this Portuguese entrepreneur sacked Malacca, the greatest seaport in South East Asia, with its 100,000 inhabitants.
Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamelukes during days of bloody fighting in the streets of Cairo, and then sacked it in 1517. Rhodes fell to the Turks in 1522. Rebellious peasants pillaged Mainz in 1525. In 1527, the Shans sacked Ava, the Northern Burmese capital. That same year, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome, thus ending the Renaissance with a military flourish.
Spain sacked Tunis in 1535. In 1536, British King Henry VIII and his Prime Minister, Sir Thomas Cromwell, ransacked and dissolved eight hundred abbeys, friaries and nunneries. The Abbey at Glastonbury – said to have once housed the Sacred Chalice – suffered a commercial sack from which it never recovered.
“The destruction of books was almost incredibly
enormous. Bale describes the use of them
by bookbinders and by grocers and merchants for the packing of their
goods. Maskell
calculates the loss of liturgical books alone to have approached the total of a
quarter of a million. An eye-witness
describes the leaves of Duns Scotus as blown about by
the wind even in the courts of Oxford, and their use for sporting and other
purposes. Libraries that had been
collected through centuries, such as those of Christ Church and St. Albans,
both classical and theological, vanished in a moment. It was not only the studious orders that
gathered books; the friars, also, had libraries, though, as Leland relates of
the Oxford Franciscans, they did not always know how to look after them. So late as 1535, a bequest was made by the
bishop of St. Asaph of five marks to buy books for
the Grey Friars of Oxford. Nor can it be
doubted that vast numbers of books less directly theological must have
perished.” Taken from “The Dissolution
of the Religious Houses,” at http://www.bartleby.com/213/0301.html
The French army and Berber pirate allies sacked Nice in 1543. In 1544, the English re-sacked Edinburgh. Russians took Kazan in 1554 and Astrakhan in 1556. The Portuguese destroyed Rio de Janeiro in 1557. From 1562 to 1628, France indulged its worst bigots during the Huguenot Wars. The Protestant half of the brightest French luminaries was forced to seek refuge, honor and livelihood in foreign lands. France would compete with them for centuries to come. In this manner, France doomed itself to second-rate – if good Catholic – status. In 1569, Northern English Earls sacked Durham Cathedral.
The Russians sacked Novgorod in 1570. The Tatars sacked and burned Moscow in 1571 (200,000 dead). Antwerp fell to Spain in 1576 and again in 1585. Venice burned in 1577. After liberating themselves from Spain and enjoying a brief Golden Age, most Flemish cities were sacked by foreign armies. An English fleet sacked Cadiz and Lisbon in 1587. Another Portuguese army sacked Mombassa in 1589. Moroccans destroyed Gao, the Songhai capital. They sacked Timbuktu in the early 1590’s, destroyed Ahmed Baba’s library and the famous University of Sankore. The English sacked Cadiz again in 1596.
At Oxford, the Bodleian library replaced the original that had burned down in 1602. Khiva was destroyed in 1603. Cardinal Federigo Borromeo founded the Ambrosian Library in Milan in 1609, possibly from remnants of the great library of its defeated rival, Como. The Achenese sacked Johore in 1613. The Japanese government took Osaka Castle in 1615. During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) at least ten million victims died—nearly every other German. Imagine what happened to the region’s libraries. Dutch adventurers burned down Jakarta in 1619 and enslaved the Banda islanders to extract more spice. Prague was looted repeatedly; the Austrians sacked it in 1620. Heidelberg was sacked in 1621. In 1630, Ottomans destroyed Hamadan, the ancient capital of Media. The next year, Protestant Swedes took Frankfurt and Catholic Germans took Magdeburg, both by storm. Japanese government troops stormed Hara castle in 1637. In 1645, the Manchus sacked Yang-chou with ‘very heavy casualties.’ They would take another forty years to subdue the Ming dynasty. Kandahar fell to the Persians in 1649. In 1654, the Russians took Smolensk. A year later, the Swedes took Warsaw, lost it to the Poles and then retook it. That same year, the Russians retook Kiev.
The magnificent city of Edo (Tokyo) numbered 107,000 inhabitants in 1657, the year it burned down. The Siamese took Chiengmai in 1662. The next year, the Moguls took Assam. In 1664 and again in 1670, King Sivaji took Surat. Its twice-wrought destruction became the pivot point of his life—how sad. By 1665, 100,000 Londoners had died of plague. The city burned down the next year. The Moguls took Chitagong in 1666. Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan fell to Cossacks in 1670. The Russians retook Astrakhan in 1671.
The Library of the Escorial of Madrid burned down in 1671, taking with it most of the official documentation of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, since the Spanish Crown forbade dissemination of this information beyond its domain. In 1673, the French took Maastricht. In 1688, Karakorum was destroyed and Athens was gutted. The Turks used the Parthenon as a powder magazine, which Venetian artillery promptly blew up. Five months later, the Venetians ‘won’ the battle of Athens. By then, plague had emptied the city. It would remain empty for three years. Then the Turks retook it.
During the endgame of World War II, despite Churchill’s promise to the contrary, the British Army used the Parthenon as a gun battery site. From this dominant height, they shelled the working class districts of Athens. Thus did Churchill and a succession of Anglo-Saxon hypocrites re-employ Greek fascists to rule Greece at gunpoint for the next forty years. Much the same way rearmed Japanese troops continued to garrison most of South East Asia after Japan’s surrender, against native Nationalists and on behalf of undermanned Allied victors.
Many ‘retired’ Nazis became government functionaries throughout post-war Europe. Bushido-boys rapidly regained corporate dominion over Japan. Before and during the war, the BundesBank bankrolled the Nazis—you can guess how. Now, it is the financial powerhouse of Europe. The American OSS absorbed 1500 ex-Gestapo operatives when it became the CIA—above and beyond the ex-Nazi rocket scientists we brought home with us. Japanese masters at genocide, who’d infected countless Chinese and Allied prisoners with plague, anthrax and other epidemics, were pardoned in exchange for their laboratory notes. Who knows how many more demons incarnate became prized NATO functionaries? Needless to say, Russian Stalinists were just as accommodating to evil.
In 1693, a French army sacked Heidelberg. The French ravaged Germany with destruction equivalent to the Thirty Years War (no wonder the Germans came back later and demanded payback). Three years later, the Russians took Azov. The Omani took Mombassa in 1698, the same year Whitehall Palace burned down. In 1703, the Swedes took Warsaw again. Algerians took Oran in 1709. French troops sacked Rio de Janeiro in 1711. In 1716, fanatical Lamaist Dzugar Mongols took and sacked the Lamaist holy center at Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. In 1720, the Chinese took Turfan and Urumchi. Copenhagen burned down in 1728. Constantinople suffered great fires in 1729, 1756 and 1782. The Persians sacked Delhi in 1736. They took Balkh, Ghazni and Kabul in 1738. They destroyed Delhi and the entire Mogul Empire in 1739. They took Bukhara and Khiva in 1740. In 1751, the Mons took Ara, the capital of Burma. Six years later, the Burmese took Pegu, the Mon capital. Moscow burned down in 1752. The Bambaras took Timbuktu, Djenne and Bamako in 1755. Russians took Azov in 1783. As part of the British conquest of India, Lord Cornwallis burned down the city of Bangalore. This is how he ‘redeemed’ his military reputation ‘soiled’ by his defeat at Yorktown.
Has this tale of wanton destruction made you cross-eyed yet?
Almost every European, Turkish and Persian town was besieged, plundered and/or burned during this period—ostensibly over the best way to worship God. Lisbon – the capital of a prosperous maritime empire two hundred years old – was annihilated, one crisp Sunday morning in 1755, by a massive earthquake, tidal wave and firestorm. Voltaire noted this sample of God’s affection in his novel, Candide.
The founder of the Afghan/Durani dynasty sacked Delhi in 1756 and again in 1760. That same year, the Russians burned Berlin. In 1765, Harvard College burned down along with its library, destroying over 90% of its books; Princeton’s Nassau Hall Library burned in 1802. The Burmese sacked Ayutha in 1767. In 1775, the Tuaregs took Timbuktu. In 1799, the French took Naples, once again by storm. In the late 1700’s, fanatical Wahhabi tribesmen invaded Tarim. It was an Arab city with 365 mosques and a great many libraries. Between their assault and an infestation of white worms, every book housed there was lost.
Almost every European and Mediterranean city suffered significant damage during the Napoleonic Wars. Wellington’s army, for example, sacked Bajadoz in 1811—imitating Napoleon and his marshals whose troops sacked every city they took. In 1812, the Russians burned Moscow out from under Bonaparte. In 1811, the Montserrat Monastery Library burned down. In 1814, the British took Washington D.C. Seeking reprisal for an equivalent atrocity the Americans had perpetrated against the Canadian capital at Toronto, they burned down the White House and the Capitol Building. These structures housed the first Library of Congress. It was later replaced by Thomas Jefferson’s library. A tornado descended on the city. It killed and maimed more British soldiers than ineffectual American resistance had, on that day.
In 1820, the Siamese were alarmed at vague rumors that the British were about to attack them, presumably with Laotian help. They invaded Laos and burned down every public structure in Vientiane, the Lao capital. They burned alive, in giant bamboo cages, every Lao prisoner they did not enslave.
Canton burned in 1822. Macau’s Archives were destroyed by fire in 1825 and 1885. In 1827, the Dahomey took Whydah. In 1828, the Russians carried off the fine library from Ardebil, capital of Azerbaijan. New York City burned in 1845. Montreal’s Parliament buildings were destroyed by fire in 1849. So was Rangoon, Burma, in 1850. In 1851, the remaining two thirds of Jefferson’s book collection burned up along with most of the second Library of Congress; so did San Francisco. Tokyo burned in 1857. Along with many other cities, Nanking was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. In 1864, its magnificent Porcelain Pagoda, Hong Xiquan’s palace and the Ming Palace nearby, were smashed. Vicksburg, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Laurence, Kansas; Columbia, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia and other American towns suffered the same fate during the American Civil War (1860-65). Quebec City burned in 1866. Beginning August 23, 1870, the Prussians decided to burn down Strasbourg with incendiary shells from their siege artillery, along with its picture gallery, its city library full of ancient treasures, its Huguenot Temple Neuf and most of the roof of its Cathedral. A German rehearsal for future outrages of this kind, intended to force surrender, which only cohered local resistance. A French Communard mob burned down the Tuilleries library in Paris in 1871, with its 250,000 books. The Great Chicago fire occurred the same year; Boston burned down a year later. In 1882, Chile confiscated the National Library of Peru and transferred its contents from Lima to Santiago.
From the mid-1800s on, some excuse or other was found to flatten almost every city on Earth. For example, British troops burned down Benin, the capital of an empire at least six hundred years old. Its magnificent sculpted wood and cast bronze artwork never truly recovered.
Messina was swallowed by a gruesome tidal wave in 1908. The entire 1890 U.S. Census burned up in 1920. In 1922, Young Turks burned down the city of Smyrna and sent the Greek minority and the Greek Army dispatched to protect them, scrambling back to Greece. This atrocity was a continuation of their super-efficient, futuristic, German-supervised campaign to exterminate every Turkish Armenian (at least a million of them from 1894 to 1915). Who knows how many Orthodox churches, seminaries and libraries went up in flames?
Whenever human avarice and cruelty were not up to the task, natural catastrophe did the trick. For example, 140,000 people and uncounted documents perished when an earthquake and firestorm leveled Tokyo in 1923.
The University of Virginia Library burned down at the beginning of the 20th century. So did the Italian National Library at Turin, from an electrical fire in 1904. At least 100,000 items of the 320,000-book collection went up in flames, including many priceless manuscripts and its entire Oriental collection. On February 19, 1938, a fire at West Point destroyed its library and a lot of American history prior to that date.
Major libraries and collections destroyed by warfare during the last century include but are not limited to: Peking, Port Arthur, Louvain, Noyon, Amiens, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Salonika, Rheims, Cambrai, Belgrade, Smyrna, Kiev, Vilna, Minsk, Shanghai, Suchow, Nanking, Guernica, Madrid, Nanking, Warsaw, Cracow, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Coventry, London (where 60% of World War I military records were destroyed during the Blitz), Valetta, Benghazi, Tripoli, Belgrade, Minsk, Vitebsk, Kiev, Viasma, Smolensk, Bryansk, Odessa, Uman, Kharkov, Sevastopol, Rostov, Stalingrad, Belgorod, Budapest, Ancona, Naples (where retreating Nazis burned 80,000 volumes of the Royal Society), Pisa, Milan, Caen, St. Nazaire, Brest, Metz, Arnhem, Hamburg, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Köln, Essen, Dresden, Heidelburg, (virtually every German, Japanese, Eastern European and Eastern Chinese city was leveled as were many more across Europe), Mandalay, Rovaniemi, Tartu, Manila, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, Shuri, Rangoon, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Seoul, Pyongyang (founded in 1122 BCE; ravaged by the Japanese in 1592, 1894 and 1904; and by the Americans in 1951), Jerusalem, Port Said, Hanoi, Hue, Phnom Penh, Jolo, Belfast, Beirut, Amritsar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Grozny, Kabul and Baghdad.
During the Greater Paroxysm, European fascists made a point of burning every Hebrew and Yiddish scripture, every Cyrillic text and icon they found in Russia, as well as every progressive book they could find anywhere in any language. Their destruction totaled hundreds of millions of books.
“The most extensive Soviet deportations, however, were
carried out as Soviet troops liberated territory in 1943-44. The people affected were the minorities
living on the north slope of the Caucasus and the west bank of the Volga, who
maintained their own languages and religions, primarily Islam but also
Buddhism, and who had been largely unaffected by the strongly Slav and Orthodox
elements of Russian culture ... In total, about 1,200,000 were affected. During 1943-44, the Soviets deployed hundreds
of thousands of troops to forcibly remove these people, and they were moved
with few possessions, in cattle trucks with little or no food and water. Probably about 500,000 died in transit or
subsequently in the Gulag. The Soviet
authorities removed all references to these people, and all materials in their written languages were
destroyed.” Clive Ponting, Armageddon, Random House, 1995, p. 223. Italics mine.
These predatory tactics are not unique to Soviet Russia. On the contrary, they are consistent with weapon managers in general. Euro-Americans treated American Indians with equivalent tenderness. For example, they forbade Indian children to speak their mother tongue while they forced them to attend residential schools. Other empires treated their ethnic minorities just as shamelessly or worse.
Chunking, China burned down in 1949; Tottori, Japan in 1952. Priceless text collections in Florence were ravaged by flooding in the 1960’s. Mandalay, Burma burned in 1981 and Lashio in 1988.
In this so-called 21st century of ‘modern’ civilization, library collections are systematically neglected; they go up in flames by accident or malevolent intent. Librarians at the Czech National Library in Prague confessed to enormous damage from neglect and appealed for international aid. The entire ex-Soviet Union’s collection is in dire straits. The same confession applies to most Second and Third World collections. America’s Library of Congress is a sieve. The American University Library in Beirut was bombed. Bosnia’s National Library was especially targeted for Aggressor destruction. In 1966, Indonesia’s greatest living writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Pram), saw his library burnt to the ground by sneering militarists before they dragged him off to ten years in exile. How many more private libraries had to suffer the same fate at the hands of armed infants? 80% of U.S. Army service records from 1912 to 1960 were lost in a 1973 fire at the St. Louis National Personnel Center. The library in Hama, Syria was destroyed in 1982. In 1983, a fire destroyed the St. Michael’s House collection in Australia. The Los Angeles Public Library burned down in 1986. In the spring of 1988, a Shiite library in Teheran was wiped out by one of Saddam Hussein’s randomly aimed Scud missiles. Many irreplaceable, thousand-year-old texts were destroyed. A 1989 fire leveled the Russian Library of the Academy of Sciences on Vasilievski Island. The Chinese destroyed the major monastery of Gandem, outside Lhasa, in the 1960’s. Inexcusably, they’ve wrecked every Tibetan monastery since. A hundred year flood and ensuing fire in 1995 gutted the archives of the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. On September 21, 1996, the library at Linkoeping, Sweden, was destroyed by fire. Takastan Monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery in Bhutan, suffered the same fate on 19 April, 1998. On June 10, 1999 the Kashmir State Cultural Center burned down. California State University’s (CSU) Hayward Library was arsoned in May of 2000. In Ambon, Mollucas Island in Indonesia, the Christian University Campus was set ablaze in June of 2000. The Iraqi library at Basra burned down during the American invasion in 2003; though its chief librarian, Alia Muhammad Baker, managed to save 70% of her collection with the help of heroic local townspeople.
If I’ve left out some act of cultural vandalism or urban disaster of noteworthy viciousness, please write to me about it for inclusion in future versions of this chapter. If anyone ever bothered to write up humanity’s global self-lobotomy, that work was destroyed in its turn.
Meanwhile, almost every book printed since the 1800’s is quietly self-destructing. Their cheap, high-acid paper reacts to light, heat and moisture by crumbling to dust. Fahrenheit 451 has reached room temperature, these days. The wonderful world of chemistry has relieved Ray Bradbury’s fascistic, science fiction dystopians from the thankless chore of burning every book. Ephemeral electronic media are even more vulnerable. Any massive breakdown of civilization will see most of them perish, including this work. In addition, our recording media’s engineered obsolescence affords our literature repeated opportunities to disappear. Herculean efforts to transfer print media onto digital databases (mostly meaningless megatons of accounting documents) will only mitigate this devastation. In library after library, reluctant staffers have dumped truckloads of perfectly fine books and bibliographic materials into the nearest landfill. Meanwhile, their MBA-certified weapon managers crow that they’ve achieved cost-cutting ‘goals’.
In the future, preserving old ideas – especially idiosyncratic and culturally specific ones deviating from the mass media norm – shall become private, oral and website responsibilities much more often than public, paper-published ones. Since the technocrats refuse to do their obvious duty, we will need many more bards, witches, griots and shamans to assume these adult responsibilities.
Addenda: On Black Tuesday, April 15, 2003, Iraq’s National Library, its National Museum and Islamic Library were looted, ruined and burned by unchecked rioters and expert grave robbers. Once again for the ten thousandth time, the world suffered a terrible lobotomy.
Tell me, is this really the 21st century in which I have to serve my time, or is the Monster Hulagu still in charge? In fact, we Americans have confirmed that we are worse news than the Taliban. They found nothing better to do that blow up two giant statues of Buddha in the valley of Bamian. The official in charge of that demolition just got elected into the new Afghan Parliament. I hope he chokes on the power he amassed at gunpoint.
A hundred years from now, once everyone will have forgotten Saddam Hussein, Bush the Lesser will be remembered as the American yokel who oversaw the annihilation of Baghdad’s priceless collections. A thousand years from now, that may be the only thing this flash-in-a-pan American Empire is remembered for. How mightily those mental midgets will have fallen!
Only Texans and their greed-driven associates could secure the Oil Ministry yet leave the National Library, Islamic Library and Museum of Iraq unguarded. Their school-marms didn't ‘learn’ them Mesopotamian archeology the way mine did, with deep reverence. The U.S. Central Command was repeatedly warned before-hand. It took no precautions. Clueless barbarians…
As for the U.S. Marines, some butter-bar Platoon Leader should have grasped what his superiors – from the President on down – were too stupid, ignorant and lazy to realize. That kind of man-on-the-ground, take-the-initiative response is what good officers are paid for: to post guards over unforeseen yet vital installations. He should have arrested anyone who reached for those sacred collections, and his superiors should have backed him instinctively.
He may have tried; who knows? History is the first love of a real soldier. No history buff would have permitted that outrage without protest. But he would have had to buck his request up the Chain of Command. During its ascent, it would have had to run past the stupidest link in the chain (perhaps the top one in the White House?). Did some overworked staff officer – perhaps tallying available squads of warm bodies versus square blocks left to guard – simplify his worthless career by bucking back a sharply worded reply: “Negative. Do nothing.”? Or maybe he was just an insider hireling of rich collectors intent on stealing those artifacts, and made sure his patron’s lusts were satisfied?
In either case, if there is any difference between overwhelming firepower and victorious acumen, Americans have yet to learn it.
This must be a new low for the United States Marine Corps. Allowing the Baghdad collections to vanish on your watch, that rates right down there with routing from the gun line at First Bull Run and thus earning the Union Army another four years of massacre. Or allowing the Marine Barracks in Beirut to be truck-bombed flat without a serious fight, days after similar targets were struck the same way.
America must learn – slowly and painfully – what every idiot empire in history had to learn during its roller-coaster ride of growth, conquest, stagnation and annihilation—just before its allied victims strip it of everything it once cherished. Like accidental homicide during the commission of another crime; stupidity, shortsightedness and cultural ignorance never excuse the unintended consequences of our worst impulses. History doesn’t care how Texan, Republican, corporate and otherwise inept and self-serving our leaders may be, or how clueless we must have been to empower them, except to hasten our defeat.
America and Australia have the luxury of dominating their continent without a military rival worthy of the name (unlike other, sub-continental nations). They may cower on their own continent and remain as small-town, closed-minded and bigoted as they please. Americans may undereducate their youth until our college students don’t know what a twelve year-old would know overseas. Our most mephitic fat cats may send mercenaries out to comb the world and rip off its treasury, bolted down or otherwise, with relative impunity.
Once we venture forth into the Big Bad World, however, permissive incompetence becomes lethal. It will bring us consequences much more serious than mere public embarrassment of our collective bumpkinhood.
Americans, be warned! Like a spoiled child during a temper tantrum, we’ve broken a priceless vase in a china shop. We’ve already been badly scraped, once (on 9/11). Next time, we’re likely to get sliced up good. Everyone has, who’s preceded us down this Shining Path to attempted dominion of WeaponWorld.
Organizing PeaceWorld on our watch would be a much better deal for everyone concerned—America’s interests, strengths and limitations foremost.
On Monday, January 5, 2004 of this so-called civilized age, thousands of rare Sanskrit manuscripts, ancient books and palm leaf inscriptions were destroyed in half an hour, as two hundred and fifty protesters ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. One of the worst losses is a clay tablet dating back to the Assyrian civilization of 600 BCE. The protesters, members of a group called the Sambhaji Brigade, pelted stones and broke glass at the Institute. Some cut telephone lines so the police could not be alerted. Police protection had been given to three historians, G. B. Mahendale, Shrikant Bahulkar and V. L. Manjul, in the light of the controversy over a book containing allegedly objectionable observations by author and teacher James Laine, on the parentage of the Maratha warrior King Shivaji. In the process, he paints a new and more complex picture of Hindu-Muslim relations from the 17th century to the present. The controversy seemed to have been resolved when Mr. Laine apologized last month for his statements on Shivaji. The book's publisher, Oxford University Press, withdrew the book from the market. Police arrested seventy-two people for the vandalism, reports Newkerala.com.
Thus do fundamentalists disgrace their own creed.
“4/29/2005 -- The Central Library in Imphal, the capital of
the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, has suffered what historian Gangumei
Kamei called “an incalculable loss.” A
group pushing for Mayek script to replace the state’s official Bengali script,
set the facility ablaze, destroying as many as 145,000 books, including some of
the oldest and rarest texts. Officials
say the protestors were a combination of members of the regional United Forum
for Safeguarding Manipuri Script and Language, and a separatist rebel group,
the Kangleipak Communist Party. The BBC
News quoted an attorney as describing the arson as a “Taliban-style” act. Officials say that for several months the
groups have been demanding the government adopt the Mayek script and drop the
Bengali used for the last three hundred years to write the Meitei
language. Some local newspapers have
begun publishing editions in both languages.” http://www.libraryjournal.com./article/CA527242?display=breakingNews
I wish I never had to add another disgraceful incident to this long and sorry list. I suspect that I shall have to. At times, this human race can truly sicken one. Oh well; as my favorite tee-shirt would say:
Learner:
Not of this species,
Not from this planet.
An electrical fire on September 2004 gutted the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, the hometown of Goethe. Over 50,000 irreplaceable books were lost, even though a daisy chain of good people saved 6,000 tomes from the flames, and another 22,000 were spared. The library has since been rebuilt and 60,000 titles, including thousands painstakingly restored, were returned to it. The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami flooded out who knows how many archives within that region and drowned their guardians.
March 5, 2007: the Al-Mutanabi book market in Baghdad was car bombed and destroyed. It had been a world-famous center of reading and scholarship for centuries, even under the heavy hand of Saddam Hussein. Like the dynamiters of the Shia’s most holy Karbala and Najaf shrines, may the perpetrators repent their deeds before they die!
On March 3, 2009, the municipal archives of Köln (Cologne) collapsed, killing two people, ruining many medieval manuscripts and four hundred boxes of the author Heinrich Böll’s (1917-1985) private papers and unpublished manuscripts.
The World Trade towers contained several archives and museums that were destroyed on 9/11/2001.
On or just before the
first weekend of 2012, during rioting between political protestors and the
military, the Institute of Egypt was gutted by twelve hours of fire and then
flooded by Cairo’s Fire Department. The
next week, the remains of 192,000 books, journals and writings were being
picked over by volunteers trying to salvage something from the wet ashes of the
collapsed building. One of the five
copies in existence of the 24-volume Description
de l’Égypte, hand-written by Napoleon’s scientific expedition, was
destroyed, along with many irreplaceable texts on Egyptian culture and
history.
At a minimum, the
Egyptian military failed to protect the building from arsonists and failed to
put the fire out quickly, when nearby buildings were either protected or their
fires were extinguished instantly. At
worst, they set the fire themselves. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/19/cairo-institute-burned-during-clashes
In the text below, replace the term ‘Fascism’ with ‘modern political thought.’
“Fascism contemplates above all the future and the
development of mankind merely from the vantage point of political reality and
believes neither in the possibility nor the usefulness of eternal peace. It rejects therefore pacifism, which under a
pretense of magnanimity hides the renunciation of combat and cowardice. [Author’s note: pacifism hides the
renunciation of cowardice, indeed!
Mussolini typifies those moral cowards whose life-meaning collapses the
moment they stop inflicting pain on someone, anyone]. Only war brings human energies to their
highest tension and ennobles those peoples [that] dare to undertake it. All other tests are only substitutes, which
never put men before the highest decision, that of the choice between life and
death [Russian roulette, Your Predaciousness?
Be my guest!]. Therefore every
doctrine which starts out from a premeditated revolution for peace is foreign
to Fascism.” Mussolini, quoted by Alfred
Vagts in A History of Militarism, Greenwich Editions, 1959, p. 437.
Replace the term ‘Fascism’ with ‘modern political thought.’ A choice you were forced to accept without any alternative. Do you get the picture now?
Weapon mentality is the operating system that drives the hardware/wetware of weapon technology through the application program (constantly upgraded) of weapon management. This management takes great pride in the finality of its cruel and arbitrary dictates. It is more interested in its routines and traditions than in the moral consequence of its acts. It would rather maintain the illusion of its perfection than resolve its most persistent contradictions.
Weapon mentality and its outcomes are not aberrations or errors. Learners should defy that weapon myth. Greed, psychosis, stupidity and gross criminality (those eternal bugaboos) are mere symptoms of the problem, not its cause. The chainsaw logic of weapon mentality is consistent; its barbarity, fully justified and ‘moral’ within its own frame of reference. Wherever weapon mentality prowls unchallenged, it distorts every facet of life. Paraphrasing Churchill’s quip about German imperialists, weapon managers are either groveling at our feet or lunging for our throats.
Weapon mentality is a parasite lacking creativity, which manifests nothing beyond its compulsion and terror. Incapable of independent productivity, it relies on peace technology for sustenance. Unable to destroy humanity’s innate sense of dignity and grace, it twists those root truths just enough to suit its own purposes.
First off, it crams our constellation of political metaphors with weapon myths.
As far as weapon mentality is concerned, human compassion is an unnecessary burden. Vicious battle elites find rank, power, comparative wealth and imaginary security by acting as faithful servants of weapon mentality. Anyone who takes a moral stand is co-opted, marginalized and attacked. Promotion is based on willingness to compromise basic principles and inflict the maximum allowable harm. A promising career, and often professional survival, decree that good conscience be abandoned.
The biblical tale in Genesis 22, in which God demands that Abraham sacrifice his son, is a good analogy. Except that, unlike merciful God, weapon mentality sees that this sacrifice gets carried out to its bloody term, by the book.
Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and
said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches
there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to
slay his son.
When lo! An angel called him out of
heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
-- Wilfred Owen died in battle in November, 1918, a week
before the Armistice
Weapon mentality is stoical, discipline enforcing and contagious. It is anti-moral though very moralistic. It operates in direct contravention of peace values. Like a virus, weapon mentality guts healthy peace management cells to replicate its own kind. Gathering whatever it finds most handy and culling the rest, it crosses with impunity every barrier of empire, race, religion, nationality and ideology. You know, all those notions heroes routinely died for? Weapon mentality treats them like the phantasms they actually are.
Abusing its ascendancy in a Darwinian struggle for the survival of the deadliest, weapon mentality perverts human culture and obstructs every overture of peace. It has done little else throughout history, with our consent. What’s more, weapon mentality remains ‘fixed’ in human history. Dependable peace has never endured. Prior to today’s global communication networks, no prototype peace technology could spread fast enough through the weapon cults that surrounded it.
Peace technologies weaken under attack, even as their adherents strengthen themselves in suffering and sacrifice. Only a few civilizations made peace their first priority. Without exception, they succumbed to the weapon technologies that surrounded them. They became ‘pre-historic,’ forgotten by everyone.
Since I’m much less of a man than Gandhi, I cannot call myself pacifist while I serve hard time on this hell-world among these simpering killer primates. Every nation secretes an inescapable battle elite of vile individuals. It is our repulsive obligation to practice selective violence against them, smother their toxic influence and shelter the children—provided we redistribute wealth and power in peace.
The tendentious designations of Pacifist and Militarist have been explained to death elsewhere. Their rivalry has been mere mouse skittering compared to the legionary foot-tread of common weapon stalwarts.
Similarities between pacifists and militarists are striking. Both enlist small groups of sullen fanatics on the margins of society. Both rely on powerful, charismatic patrons to dispel routine lethargy, shatter petty deadlocks, reroute police scrutiny and advertise widely. Both share moral attitudes that are chronic in modern society and that turn acute in high-stress situations—rather like herpes virus in a stressed individual or the latent TB that may bring me down some day. Both make noisy claims during periods of social turmoil. During these stressful times, one group redecorates our courtrooms and punishment cells with the outcome of its reawakened conscience, while the other inks the latest pages of history with the blood of its next victims. Both rely on mass media to multiply their small numbers and amplify their impossible demands.
Pacifists range from those who would rather starve than let their bodily defenses kill off microorganisms naturally, (as many Jain elders opt to do), to conscientious objectors who may or may not fight for a cause they find just, or cooperate with their nation when it goes to war. This form of reluctant cooperation defines the common mass of weapon stalwarts, whether or not they’re killing each other at war.
Finally, many cosmopolitan people – such as I – seek PeaceWorld. More often than not, they support some less coherent, less than feasible alternative. Their hope tends to dwell on wishful thinking about peaceful nationalism (a patent contradiction) and touchy-feely sentimentalism rather than the nuts, bolts and binding washers of a pragmatic global peace.
Pacifism serves as a term of law to designate another group of people who impede weapon management in times of war. Along with them come spies, rebels, deserters, draft dodgers, traitors and aliens. These people aren’t considered ‘pacifists’ despite their routine allegiance to cosmopolitan peace.
The term pacifist was first coined to create a legal pigeonhole for a few thousand conscientious objectors who protested against World War I on the record and thus the hard way. They earned equal shares of contempt and brutality from Allied and Central Power bureaucrats.
Rarely having been shot at, (that I know of), I suspect that everyone who comes under hostile fire becomes a devout pacifist. “There are no warmongers in foxholes!”
To date, organized pacifists have insulated themselves and their cherished ideals from the mainstream of society. Usually, the weapon media paint them as decadent, pasty-faced, ‘morally superior’ outsiders and wise guys. Many pacifists embrace these labels, to the detriment of their cause.
The term Militarist encompasses those who advocate serious military preparedness and/or preemptive aggression. The essence of military preparedness is aggression, since battlefields are the only valid training ground for real armies, and mortal enemies, their only real instructors. It includes proponents of any weapon state except our own. Our nationals, of course, are peace loving, anti-militarist and free.
Sure thing, buddy.
Weapon states may remain overtly militaristic, even though they’ve spent decades at peace with everyone but their own minorities. Some of the biggest empires – bloated with war booty, conquered territory, devastating firepower and drone populations of slaves, warriors, warlords, convicts and disenfranchised victims – simply deny their own militarism. That takes care of that!
Militarists often call themselves patriots: “The last refuge of the scoundrel,” per Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
Like most weapon terms, these designations are useless―as clumsy as they are vague.
Pacifists usually seek their shade in center-left politics, while militarists hunt opportunistically from the far right (their usual turf) through the middle ground to the far left—wherever they can pull down the most cash. As hobbies go, weapons technology is quite expensive.
I’d replace these first terms (the usual expressions) with the ones that follow, from Learners’ vocabulary.
· Militarists: weapon mentors, weapon sectarians, weapon managers, battle elites, and weapon technicians (depending on their actual job assignment).
· Pacifists, opposition activists, and random, reductive meliorists: weapon dissenters.
· Most people, for the most part peaceful, who would march off to war if asked nicely. And their children, taught to expect war, not a better life in peace and more success at it: common weapon stalwarts (the crushing majority of humanity).
· Useful transformational revolutionaries: Learners.
It all depends on the people in question: whether they know what they’re doing and why. My terms focus on results rather than intent. I hesitate to pigeonhole specific people and institutions based on their political packaging and outlook rather than their results.
People tend to respond flexibly to complex and often paradoxical circumstances, internal as well as external. Many people say one thing and do the opposite, then applaud the paradoxical outcome of their behavior. Too many more claim the best intentions, scrutinize their means compulsively and yet accept horrible outcomes as inevitable.
The weapon/peace dialectic endorses two conflicting definitions of anarchy.
In misleading us this way, that self-contradiction matches most of our political metaphors. Two contrary definitions serve to render a term meaningless and therefore useful to weapon mentality. Deeper meanings of truth and peace are poison to it. Weapon political metaphors do not require specific meanings beyond those needed to lie and kill.
For peace mentality, words like justice and liberty have a specific meaning that corresponds exactly to real-time behavior. Either there is justice or there isn't justice. Simple.
For weapon mentality, mushy words like that are just reassuring noise everyone may parrot mindlessly, about actions which it can transform into their exact opposite whenever it is more convenient, and still call them the same. There can be injustice and it can be called justice. No problem.
The supreme commands: lie, kill, sacrifice, etc., must always be shouted loud enough and understood immediately by everyone on the national parade ground and in global fire fights. No conflicting expressions need be so accurate or consistent.
The main function of classical philosophy is to render all the other (non-military) terms as amorphous and meaningless as possible, in the most confusing manner possible.
The clarity you might find in Learners, despite its middling prose, is forbidden by classical philosophy and chased from its primary texts. Elaborate protocols and wordy formulae are developed with the twin goals of neutralizing valid ethics and preventing peace. The facts to be established indisputably by classical philosophy are that the yearly starvation of millions of babies is inevitable, and that world peace is impossible and unwise. Your grades as a child and the publication of your adult manuscript will depend on the beauty of your prose admitting these revolting principles and your solid logic in confirming them.
Reactionaries define anarchy as the following nightmare scenario. Learners calls it chaosism, and its practitioners, chaosists. A chaosist may commit any crime he can get away with, based on his ruthlessness, strength and firepower. During periods of chaosism (reactionary anarchy), no bourgeois may doze off at night, confident that his throat won’t be slit, his property stolen/vandalized, and his family enslaved before he reawakens.
Don’t bother to remind reactionaries that this is exactly what happens to those caught in the path of armies in wartime or to the poor in times of peace. They won’t listen. According to reactionaries, anarchists promote this kind of anarchy. Shooting them like rabid dogs would be salutary.
Anarchists have a different view of anarchy. In their version, every rule of property and class should be discarded in favor of self-discipline and fellow feeling, which would lead to absolute justice and equality. No poverty, no bigotry, no inequality, war or vice. In short: Neolithic hunter-gatherer freedom. They, in turn, consider property-owners rabid dogs, etc. …
Learners uses the term ‘chaosist’ to describe the whipped-children-turned-into-adults who’d rise and fall like yo-yos during chaosism (chaos for its own sake). Think of the Thirty Years War or Rwanda at its worst. Some individuals might have survived, but no one they would recognize, survived. Victims and murderers, survivors and the dead: everyone’s core identity from the past was brutally struck down.
Also included under the designation chaosist are many whackos unbalanced enough to want to make that chaos happen: people like the Unabomber, various Book of Revelation fanatics, those who applaud bloody jihad (holy war on behalf of Islam), and just about anyone else on a really, really bad day.
Learners would reserve the term ‘anarchist’ for iron-willed utopians like Bukharin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Gandhi: the most decent men this indecent world has produced.
Anyone who would run around setting garbage dumpsters alight, smashing plate glass windows and upsetting the cars of innocent bystanders, in obedience to his pimply, teenage, glandular hyperactivity – all in the name of Glorious Anarchy – is obviously an amateur chaosist. Suicide bombers, likewise. Professional chaosists tend to pass their unarmed neighbors under the mortar and the machete, and send young suicide bombers out to die, while they remain safe and smug at home, preaching from their Good Book. If someone comes looking for them seriously armed, they run and hide like cowards.
The Learner Commonwealth will be neither lawlessly brutal nor evangelically lawless. Chaosists will be neutralized and sent along Learner pathways more theatrical, therapeutic and useful; and moral anarchists, held to their highest standards.
St. Augustine witnessed the Roman Empire dissolve before his eyes. The Goths invaded Europe from East to West; they annihilated every legion sent against them, sacked Rome and spread devastation wherever they went. Eventually, they overran Spain. Then the aptly named Vandals crossed the Med into North Africa, 80,000 strong. They took St. Augustine’s hometown, Hippo, the year after he died.
He felt powerless to prevent the destruction of everything he held dear. Can you imagine his psychic torment? Suffering from a pathetic sense of helplessness, this ultimate hand wringer etched the worst weapon myths on our bedrock constellation of political metaphors. He carefully certified the validity of innate human evil, submission to armed authority, the divine right of kings, irresistible slavery, the surrender of personal accountability and, most perniciously, the superiority of good intentions over adequate results. We have accepted his weapon myths and their unacceptable results, since.
Whether or not Christ would have endorsed all that BS (or that of the Apostle Paul, or of the Pope, or of other Christian Fundamentalists for that matter), don’t ask me. I believe Christ summed up his trust in Christian institutions and their weapon mentors when he concluded that Peter would betray him before the cock crowed three times; and “Upon this rock will I found my Church.” His delicate sense of irony was lost on unsmiling churchmen.
The Vandals might have done us a big favor by sacking Hippo twenty years earlier and silencing St. Augustine forever. Better yet, they could have taken Hippo while he lived. That would have shown him that life goes on, for better or worse, no matter our apprehension of the future.
I thought Christian faith was supposed to defuse these panic attacks. Wasn’t the Bible supposed to make us fearless in God and therefore heroic lovers of our fellow men? It turns out that Christian officials are among the most fear-crazed weapon mentors and therefore our most dangerous political philosophers. Fascism and communism were rotten offshoots of Christianity. Christian states compare favorably with the others for mass brutality, but not for much more.
Thanks to this weapon mentor’s Confessions and other published works in this reactionary vein, most people cannot bring themselves to challenge weapon management. They consider any invitation to do so a personal insult—not to mention a very scary imposition.
As for Christian reactionaries who fancy their doctrine is perfect; how do they account for the misery and exclusion it has generated – two thousand years of torture and damnation – when Christ’s message of love is so perfect and universal? We need to make elemental improvements just to clean up our act a little, much less become worthy of our Savior. Any satisfaction with current events is insane.
Since every thoughtful child undergoes a systematic peace-aversion brainwash, proposing PeaceWorld is like challenging someone’s potty training. Indeed, I have discovered that most people treat conversational gambits on the topic of world peace as if someone had farted in public. They ignore the originator if they’re polite, smile and try to escape as fast as they can. And they will ridicule him outright or attack him if they’re really crude.
I spent a half hour talking to two people about my project. Almost by reflex, they proceeded to recite a half dozen of the most common weapon myths all of us knew by heart and had accepted as rockbed truths, indisputable. I replied to each of those myths, as well as I could, showing how it distorted the truth and how its exact opposite was closer to the truth and more conducive to peace—to which they could only agree, upon reflection. These were Unitarian church congregants in Seattle, Washington, a setting that should have produced enlightened individuals completely at home with the idea of world peace. Yet they were imbued with the same weapons myths I had encountered among those least comfortable with that idea. Aversion training against peace is universal, even among lovers of peace. Even in my head and yours.
They must have thought they’d met a genuine nut.
Everyone knows perfectly well that the most ‘sophisticated’ nations practice immoral, destructive and suicidal weapon management. We may recall similar past-practice humanisms: cannibalism, live sacrifice and slavery. Once upon a time, they were hallowed human institutions acclaimed in our constellation of political metaphors. Anyone who challenged them would have been considered a nut.
Incredibly, there is no record of a well-known classical Greek philosopher (apart from the ex-slave and murdered fabulist, Aesop) who opposed slavery categorically.
These notions were condemned more or less publicly by private conscience, and then abandoned. Anyone who backed them thereafter was deemed a nut and silenced. Might there have been deviants still holding out for slavery or cannibalism? Sure, plenty. But more often than not, disgusted majorities controlled them by providing outlets for their destructive tendencies. War, for example. That may be the only one left, a routine but not too advantageous way to regulate and divert those tendencies.
Just like those humanisms, weapon management only seems inevitable. We could uproot and forget about it, for the most part – just like the others – in one short generation. It would be a question of becoming smart enough to do so, instead of reacting blindly to its blinding influence.
We assume that government is evil because government officials are corrupt. “Power corrupts—absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord J.E.E. Acton. He should have known better.
It is not so much power that corrupts, as the execution of power in ignorance. More evil emanates from neglect, ignorance and unforeseen consequences, than from any deliberate intent to do harm. Even the presence of evil-doers in positions of leadership, is a function of social ignorance.
The gleaming-eyed psycho of popular narration is usually an incompetent weapon bureaucrat who’d act wiser and better if given half a chance. That nimbler opportunity would be easy to mass-produce. Let me explain how, below.
Think yourself blindfolded and crossing a blacked-out room. It’s likely you’d stumble over the furniture, trip and come to harm. Assuming your body cells could reason among themselves, they might conclude that you enjoy doing them harm, even though that would be the last thing you wanted. Wouldn’t matter; they’d accuse you of sinister intent in any case. Whether you wanted it to happen or not, inadequate sensory input would make this damage inevitable. As long as you stumbled around in the dark, the damage would accumulate. Eventually, you’d shrug it off, dismiss your pain as just another cost of doing business, even after it had reduced you to a crawl or to cowering in a corner and renouncing further activity.
Our info elites operate under the same kind of constraint. Their reduced awareness forces them to commit evil and avoid good, by ignorance and its accident.
In defiance of the 1984 Syndrome, Learners will develop a clear-sighted, alert and responsive government. This system would consist of a network of local, democratically elected Administrations that are rich, attentive, and productive—seeing to the full empowerment of each individual; and overseen by a hyper-vigilant central government whose forceful interventions, however, would be curbed by constitutional law and paltry tax receipts.
Once we’ve removed the blindfold and turned on the lights, we’ll be surprised how many ‘inevitable’ catastrophes, personal outrages, lost opportunities and unforeseen consequences we could avoid. We’ll discover that we can take extraordinary risks in pursuit of Learning, and get away with many more of them. Avoiding most of this trouble will translate into a lot more wealth and a lot less ill will.
Our info elites maintain class privilege and economic imbalance. Everyone understands the eye-popping hypocrisy involved, the blatant contradictions we must nurture, the splendid opportunities we’ve cast aside and the tremendous stakes at risk when such policies fail. Everyone knows that they must fail, sooner or later, by their very nature. Immediate perks and personal privileges, however, silence the voice of conscience in all but a sacrificial few.
In the same way, concentration camp guards and death squads require elite status, fancier uniforms, stricter discipline, more time off, better rations, more cigarettes and alcohol—or they’d burn out on the job, poor dears. The guards foolish enough to raise objections, fed the crematoria in turn or got dispatched to a slower but just-as-certain fate in Penal Battalions on the Eastern Front. Who knows how many bad-Germans-turned-good died this way, forsaken by everyone?
Expert small-unit leaders and terrorists require the same set of talents and skills. Both must embrace a Cause, (whatever Cause that may be), enough to sacrifice themselves and their charges for It. Both must care for their subordinates, but not about them. You know, the way we might care for valuable livestock before butchering it? Both must categorize everyone as expendable underlings, unquestioned superiors or better-dead targets. Both must manipulate with skill and ease the behaviors and attitudes of their inferiors; both must enforce their orders with violence, fatal violence if necessary. They must prefer to be respected (read “feared”) by their subordinates rather than liked.
Paul Lackman reminds us of behavioral studies that correlated leadership skills with a talent for lying among children and college students.
If they do their jobs right, both leaders earn the utmost devotion from their charges. Call it esprit de corps (espree duh core, unit spirit) where individuals sacrifice everything for their military unit, or call it sadomasochistic Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages identify with their captors and defend them. Take your pick. The same doglike devotion arises from soldiers and kidnap victims alike. It’s as if we were hardwired for it.
“… Combat leadership,
particularly at junior levels, involves a mixture of forceful character and a
certain indifference to consequences.
Lieutenants and captains are never expected to have long life spans once
the shooting starts. No army can
contemplate with equanimity the thought of stable, settled, emotionally
middle-aged men leading platoons into enemy fire [author’s note: even though
venerable garrison states often produce this kind of flabby leadership]. The German army had to walk a consistently fine
line between the Scylla of emasculating its junior leaders by converting them
into bureaucratized good citizens and the Charybdis of allowing panache and
enthusiasm to degenerate into publicity-generating hooliganism.” Dennis E. Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash
of Empires,
Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1991, p. 109. By permission of Shoe String Press.
Similarly, the ultimate basic training takes place in concentration camps. Death camps are just boot camps worked out to their logical extreme, that don’t need to produce soldiers in large numbers except as guards—that always need more guards than they can produce. Many death camp survivors became Israeli war heroes during the fighting in 1948. They threw themselves willingly into suicidal attacks that would have pinned or routed the Israeli militia, never noted for its cowardice.
In Dark Nature, Lyall Watson reviews two moral codes. The first, “genetic morality,” evolved three basic rules of animal behavior during millions of years of adaptive survival:
· do good to relatives;
· do ill to everyone else; and
· cheat whenever you can.
Struggling against this genetic morality and the unspeakable horror it unleashes with boring predictability, is the basic morality of higher civilization, called “Tit-for-Tat, Plus”:
· do good first; thereafter
· do whatever the other guy just did to you (for good or ill); and
· when in doubt, revert to good. Despite the risks involved, the more often you obey this third precept, the likelier you will hook up with fellow tit-for-tat-plussers. In so doing, you will outlive gene-moralists who tend to burn out, both themselves and their neighbors, much faster.
These two moralities don’t seem very spiritual compared to Jesus’ much more demanding injunction: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to evil.” – St. Luke 6-35, the Bible.
And finally, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
You choose.
This tit-for-tat has another pitfall, according to Roy F. Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, (W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1997).
A perpetrator’s assessment of the evil he has committed is much milder than his victim’s assessment of the same evil endured. This unequal perception induces escalating spirals of retaliation.
Let’s say that I inflict (what I perceive to be) one unit of pain on you; you perceive it as two. You inflict three units on me, to get me to stop. I feel six units and inflict seven on you … Thus murderous clan feuds can ignite over mere trifles, last for generations, and spiral out of control until some outside power crushes them. Many the tyrannies that grew up this way: fanning up, juggling and suppressing the feuds of their subordinates.
In addition, if we have been subjected to multiple abuse for long stretches of time (or imagine we have), we feel entitled to do harm in return, even to innocent victims, and resent any attempt to prevent us. Laboratory rats become lethargic and fatalistic when given too many random punishments; many humans replace this fatalism with rage and a tendency for serial aggression.
This is the reason our legal system removes vengeance from the hands of crime victims and their surviving family members, and entrusts it to rich, well-insulated judges instead. The victims' appeal for punishment usually exceeds what an impartial third party would consider fair, assuming such a fair level of retaliation existed at all. By ‘fair,’ read: “reciprocally interruptible without further escalations of violence.”
It is not surprising that humans adhere to military behaviors like well-trained dogs. Throughout history, those who defied weapon mentality have suffered greater and greater refinements of ostracism, confinement, torture and murder.
One social group was picked for elite aggression and brutality; another, larger, for proletarian submission and thoughtlessness. One way or another, the smart, stubborn moderates in-between were systematically neutralized: silenced always and killed whenever necessary.
The more elite the military unit, the more numerous the officer casualties during combat. Many outstanding officers earned posthumous decorations by leading their troops into the teeth of aimed enemy fire. Other, less popular ones got shot in the back by their own troops. Even hounds will sometimes turn on their master.
Paul Lackman notes that 1,000 American commissioned officers were fragged by their own men during America’s Vietnam debacle, according to official estimates. Live grenades were wired to their toilet seats or rigged under their cots at base camp, for example. These statistics could be doubled and redoubled by unreported incidents, casualties of accident or battle, plus incidents involving non-commissioned officers (sergeants)—all in all, a large chunk of total American casualties.
Armies tend to chew themselves up in any case. Officially, six percent of American combat deaths in World War II were attributed to accidental, ‘friendly’ fire: equivalent to lining up a reinforced American infantry division of eighteen thousand men and executing them by firing squad.
This is probably just another institutional understatement, (See No. 11 under “Big Lies”). Fighting in jungles, urban areas and other settings of limited visibility and intense close combat often drives much higher the casualty counts of friendly fire, a problem aggravated by intense firepower applied to dense combat nuclei. Nonetheless, this is about par for most mechanized armies.
Officially, the US Government executed one hundred and forty-two American soldiers during World War II; a fate that befell at least ten thousand Germans, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and millions of unarmed civilians. It befell at least two thousand French soldiers during World War I and who knows how many more during WWII, between Free French forces and Vichy Nazi collaborators?
On the “field of honor,” the dark line tends to blur between tragic accident, heroic self-sacrifice and grim execution.
Just imagine, you are patrolling hostile terrain with a couple dozen scared, worn-out and filthy teenagers. They’re draped with automatic weapons and high explosives, and eager to bang away at any threat. They’re backed, in turn, by unimaginable firepower brought down sight-unseen by distant artillerists and pilots equally exhausted, stressed-out and fearful.
A standard American tactic in Vietnam was to lure large enemy formations into air power killing fields and artillery death traps baited with undermanned and isolated Allied units. American generals poured firepower across Vietnam, the way a child glutton might dissolve mounds of sugar in his breakfast cereal. Districts that contained millions of neutral Vietnamese were turned into free-fire-zones where every target (fixed and moveable) was fair game. Thus, ‘friendly’ fire became proportionately deadlier.
During the 1990 Gulf War, allied friendly fire and accident casualties virtually equaled their mortality from hostilities.
Until recently, crime and punishment, starvation, bad food, dirty water, exposure, (and especially epidemics) killed many more combatants than did battle wounds. Undiagnosed, war-related pandemics still plague modern combat veterans, despite the best efforts of their health officials. More Iraqi children died from embargo-related privation, than Iraqi soldiers from Allied firepower. No doubt, more Iraqi children have died unacknowledged from Bush the Lesser’s war, than from any other cause prior. We are such conscience-denying barbarians, carefully insulated by our weapon propaganda…
“More than 9,600 of the relatively young Operation Desert
Storm veterans have died since serving in Iraq, a statistical anomaly,” wrote
Dan Kapelovitz [in 2004] the reporter who interviewed Picou. Of those still living, more than a third –
upward of 236,000 – have filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims with the
Veteran’s Administration.
“Research overwhelmingly suggests these ailments and deaths
were caused by depleted uranium, a metal the military use in much of their
hardware, so dense it can pierce through steel-armored tanks. But this radioactive material has a half-life
of 4.5 billion years, according to renowned scientist Helen Caldicott. In Iraq, incidences of cancer, childhood
leukemia and rare mutations in newborns have skyrocketed.” http://www.rense.com/general42/werq.htm
Picture a main battle tank on fire. Its fuel and ammunition explode inside the armored carapace. The flaming wreck gives off a thin white smoke while it burns superhot, then a thick black one you can smell for miles downwind. That which would smoke, besides the crew’s bodies, would be the vaporized uranium that seared through the tank’s armor to begin with – like super-hot sand blasting through a chunk of ice – and that smears its interior now. That smoke-driven scum coats the landscape, then slowly gets washed out to sea and deeper into the earth by desert rains. Every windstorm thereafter lifts a cloud of radioactive dust.
During the First Gulf War, more American troops suffered serious poisoning by inhaling vaporized depleted uranium from American anti-tank projectiles, than the handful that got lead poisoning from Iraqi gunfire and bombs.
During the Second, tens of thousands more combat wounds and deaths. I can’t believe I have to raise that inexcusable number every time I review Learners. Don’t ask me why we're letting desperate Iraqis get up close and personal with American troops who would be safer at home in a sane nation's army.
Losses among info elites can always be replaced from the nearly limitless ranks of the info proletariat. Indeed, the quality of leadership improves as lower-order chauvinists are entrusted with carefully narrowed responsibilities. Repressive martinets are much easier to recruit and control than charismatic populists.
Campaigns of political violence and terror favor political extremists over moderates, until revulsion overwhelms the survivors. Then, for the sake of Peace, the worst genocidal murderers gain amnesty. Leaders take their bloody gains into luxury exile; the spear-carriers go back home and terrorize their peaceful neighbors. Everyone grows old nursing gory nightmares.
I wonder what life would seem like if half our surviving neighbors were unpunished murderers and a third of our people were their dead or mutilated victims—as in Rwanda. What a waking nightmare! One we have endured during past lives.
There are so many of them out there, there seems to be no satisfactory way to educate them before the deed, or punish and rehabilitate them after. It will be a major Learner endeavor to create new means to do just that before this necessity reappears, God forbid. A valid Learner prototype for this mind-numbing task may be Reverend James Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1995 in South Africa.
The Routine of Evil is weapon management’s most spectacular obscenity.
The contemporaries of Lot and Noah, as well as the fabled Atlanteans, are said to have perished from unforeseen consequences of the Routine of Evil. Once they embraced it, no alternative remained for them but annihilation. A thousand years after the Atlantis disaster, (ten thousand years? Such terms are thought to be interchangeable in ancient languages), I vaguely recall hearing that this society had indulged in arcane energy technologies that went astray—sound familiar?
It wasn’t Sodom and Gomorrah’s sexual gymnastics that God condemned, per se. Rather, He didn’t appreciate the fact that humans began believing that the upright were fools and evil, cool.
The visionary Edgar Cayce described the Atlanteans’ final conflict as a civil war. They had created human-animal chimera mutants that served them as slaves and intelligent beasts of burden. According to Cayce, two expressions of Atlantean philosophy emerged: one forbade sexual relations between pureblood humans and these chimeras, whereas the other sought to permit it.
I suspect it was a little more complicated than Cayce’s narration. The first group probably instituted permanent apartheid, whereas the second advocated civil rights and equal opportunity for the chimera. As usual, their arguments sank to the level of: “Our sisters and daughters will never marry their kind!” Cayce, an old school Virginian, reduced the argument to familiar racial-sexual terms and stood squarely on the side of the advocates of apartheid. Both sides destroyed each other in any case.
Read Paul Di Filippo’s book, Ribofunk, for brilliant short stories on the outcome of trans-human technology.
Whenever permissive criminality and institutional brutality become seriously profitable; when doing good becomes somehow effeminate, impractical and unwise; when political monologue begins to ennoble evil and impair our sense of right and wrong (the ultimate design of weapon mentality); meaningful activities grind to a halt.
In most cases, public morality guarantees group survival. The wages of sin is death, and every sinner dies, one way or another. But societies only succumb to their internal contradictions once they institutionalize their worst brutality. Here we are.
No one knows what (high) fraction of concentration camp guards were certifiable sadists and sociopaths; the rest were petty criminals, stupid opportunists and mediocre conformists who took advantage of brutal opportunities offered by their superiors.
Those superiors, in turn, carefully insulated their dainty psyches from the brutality they had instituted. They established multiple tiers of bureaucracies to run a complex paper chase of pain, misery and murder. They were very careful to remove themselves from the process, both physically and emotionally. Only rarely would a few of them go slumming among their victims and pick out a few to torture and kill, as temporary diversions and to set an example for their subordinates.
Indeed, the harshest concentration camp tasks – barracks discipline, stoking the gas chambers and ovens with bodies, and then disposing of remains – were relegated respectively to kapos and Sonderkommandos: concentration camp trustees, on the one hand, and inmate untouchables on the other. Both groups were absolute victims of the camp system.
Thanks for the reminder, Micheline Petrouchevich, my mother’s best friend forever. She took me to see movies like Alexander Nevski and The Tank on birthdays during my childhood, to show me that Russian bogeymen were just people, and just as capable of heroism, beauty and virtue, too, while my country was busy turning them into boogey-men worthy of world radioactive war.
Basically, concentration camps were designed to keep SS goon squads – handpicked from gutters and prisons of the Reich – from going insane. This mental failing was all too frequent.
If concentration camp guards had had to live, eat and sleep in barracks with their charges, the way army drill instructors have to, with their platoon, most of them would have developed protective feelings. Many of them did anyway, if only for a few beneficiaries.
Instead, personal feelings had to be compartmentalized. One mental ‘box’ stored thoughts of family, friends and nation; the other, a new universe of unbelievable cruelty.
We do much the same thing in our own heads, since we live in a global concentration camp that we refuse to recognize. We apply long-familiar double standards to minorities, foreigners and the homeless. Basically, those unlucky enough to stand outside our ‘good box’ don’t merit the consideration we give our pets.
Learners won’t let anyone else stay in the ‘bad box’ – at least not in real space-time. In imaginary, ritual and theatrical spaces, more likely.
As Elvis Costello sings, “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”
Plus, he sang: “Every day, every day, every day, I write the book…”
Sing it, E. C., sing it to me loud and clear!
“I shall become enlightened for the sake of all living
things.” Buddhist vow from the book For
the Sake of All Living Things, by John M. Del Vecchio.
The following rock pillar inscriptions were emplaced throughout the Mauryan Empire of India, circa 264 to 233 BCE. They are stone memoranda of instruction from King Ashoka to his officials and subjects.
I lifted this translation from B.G. Gokhale’s book, Ashoka Maurya. Apart from a few textual and punctuation simplifications, the only changes I made were in the way King Ashoka addressed himself within these rescripts. Sometimes, Ashoka called himself the Prince, the King, King Devanampiaya Piyadasi, Devanampiaya, or Piyadasi, the last two meaning ‘Beloved of the Gods’ and ‘Of Benevolent Mien.’ For simplicity’s sake, I replaced them with “King Ashoka.”
How often have you heard about Hitler, Genghis Khan, Alexander and other ‘Gross’ butchers of history? How often about King Ashoka and his unsung moral peers?
Compare his rescripts with recent political declarations; note how little progress we’ve made. Then compare them with the rantings of Hitler, Stalin and like weapon demagogues given much more press; compare them with today’s government press releases and speeches. ‘Primitive’ states have outshone modern society on moral grounds. Our modern moral progress is illusory.
You might have thought Ashoka was some minor princeling who indulged his eccentricities among a handful of subjects. No way; his empire covered most of South Asia and could boast of many rich cities, a massive army and a sophisticated civil service.
If King Ashoka could dedicate his life and administration to enlightenment, so can we. It would be a matter of heaving every anchor, unfurling every sail at once, and leaving raftloads of shrieking reactionaries bobbing in our wake. They would change their tune soon enough, once they realized how much better PeaceWorld would be. Few holdouts would remain to cry “Havoc!” when so many more sing of peace. Of this hymn to peace that Learners must sing in chorus, Ashoka carved out early verses in stone.
We needn’t follow Ashoka’s exact bidding. But while he forged ahead along the straight and narrow, we loiter in the brambles and bemoan unjust fate. His heroic attempts to reach the moral high ground were neither utopian, idealistic nor unrealistic—as those words are misused today. Ashoka’s example remains magnificent and practical, a model for anyone with a little common sense and pride in idealism: something we should build upon.
For all I know, Ashoka’s reign may have been a tissue of hypocrisy, contradictions and vicious lies. The official line may have preached peace while weapons mentality reigned among his snickering subordinates. Or not. His rescripts must have been read by his followers, no matter what else happened, and obeyed whenever possible. One more good deed and one less bad one would have made all his effort worthwhile.
We could share better rescripts with fewer tedious prohibitions; obey them as best we might, whenever we could. That could only do us good. We have much more latitude than Ashoka’s followers did. On PeaceWorld, the payoffs of better behavior would snowball and finance more of them exponentially.
Whether Ashoka succeeded, whether or not we succeed today, that is immaterial. He tried heroically – that’s important – and we must try even more heroically. Maintaining the status quo like sorry clowns or whining about it without making any change: that’s easy. Reaching out for the impossible … now there’s a challenge worth our genius!
In comparison, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and like-minded militancies expose their weapon mentality detrimental to progress. Yet they hold equivalent keys to peace.
We must reach into the collective superconscience and retrieve the best religious ideals from that hidden treasure trove; then, fumblingly, begin to restore them. As soon as the elephant’s transplanted brain grows takes root in its planet-sized body, many more doors to peace will open before us; each new one more advantageous and serendipitous—leading deeper and deeper into peace, as if in a dream.
Paul Lackman wondered what Ashoka’s opinion was of the Hindu custom of sati. Widows who practiced sati threw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre; later ones were “encouraged” to do so by force. Ashoka would have objected to other habits some Hindus and their Muslim descendants consider proper today: such as burning new brides alive for turning over inadequate dowries, and acid-scarring unavailable damsels (so-called honor crimes).
In private correspondence, B.G. Gokhale informed me that the custom of sati was “probably introduced by the Scythians, who appear in Indian history sometime during the 2nd to 1st centuries BCE.” He was kind enough to let me include his entire translation in Learners.
In cultures other than Ashoka’s, a tyrant’s habit of sacrificing householders as part of his funeral ceremony may have served a purpose more pragmatic than hysterical. Only one chosen successor and his retinue were required after a tyrant’s death. Every other attendant, concubine and offspring was a potential rival, conspirator and assassin. Tyrants, lions (and apparently, porpoises) are remarkably similar in their use of lineal violence to eliminate genetic rivals.
But this kind of rivalry can be set aside forever, like the tired arguments of a bad marriage. Better hymns of peace could be sung more often and more caringly.
But, let Ashoka tell his own story …
Inscription 1: This rescript on morality has been commanded
to be written by King Ashoka. Here no
animal may be slaughtered and offered in sacrifice. No convivial assembly, too, may be held. For King Ashoka sees many a blemish in
convivial assemblies. But there are some
assemblies considered good by King Ashoka.
Formerly in the kitchen of King Ashoka, every day hundreds of thousands
of animals were slaughtered for curry.
But now, since this rescript on morality has been written, only three
animals are slaughtered for curry: two peacocks and one deer, and that deer,
too, not always. Even these three
animals will not be slaughtered, hence.
Inscription 2: In all
the dominions of King Ashoka, even on the frontiers and in the territories of
the Cholas, Pandiyas, Satiyaputra, Keralaputra, even up to Tambraparni, and in
the domains of the Greek King Antiochus and his neighbors, everywhere King
Ashoka has arranged for two kinds of treatments, of men and of animals. And those medicinal herbs that are beneficial
to men and animals have been brought, and are planted wherever they did not
exist. Roots and fruits too have been
brought, and planted wherever they did not exist. On the highways, wells have been dug and
trees planted, for the use of men and animals.
Inscription 3: King Ashoka says thus: Twelve years after my
coronation have I ordered thus!
Everywhere in my dominions (administrative officers) will embark on
tours of inspection every five years, for the inculcation of morality and other
such works. (They will instruct my
subjects that) obedience to father and mother is excellent, liberality to
friends, acquaintances and kinsmen, to Brahmins and ascetics is excellent; excellent
is abstention from the slaughter of animals; and abstemiousness and few
possessions are excellent. The Council
will also order the officers to enforce these, both in the letter and spirit.
4: For a long time in
the past, for many hundreds of years, have increased the sacrificial slaughter
of animals, violence toward creatures, unfilial conduct toward kinsmen,
improper conduct toward Brahmins and ascetics.
Now, with the practice of morality by King Ashoka, the sound of war
drums has become the call to morality.
As has not come to pass for many hundreds of years, through the rescript
of morality issued by King Ashoka, and by the exhibition of heavenly mansions,
elephants, columns of fire and other heavenly forms, all this has increased,
namely: the non-slaughter of animals for sacrificial purposes, non-violence
toward beings, proper attention to kinsmen, proper attention to Brahmins and
ascetics, the welfare of mother and father, the welfare of the aged, and many
other kinds of moral behavior; all these have increased. This shall increase further. And the sons, grandsons and great grandsons
of King Ashoka will further the practice of morality, until the very end of the
universe, by standing firm in morality and character, and will instruct
therein. That, indeed, is the best of
deeds, namely, the inculcation of morality.
For those lacking in character, the practice of morality is not
possible. Hence good, verily, is the
furtherance of morality and the decrease in immorality. For this purpose, this has been commanded to
be written, that everyone shall exert for the progress of morality, and not for
its decrease. This has been commanded to
be written by King Ashoka, since he was crowned twelve years ago.
5: King Ashoka says thus: Benevolence is difficult; he who
performs a benevolent act accomplishes something difficult. I have performed much that is
benevolent. Benevolence shall also be
practiced by my sons, my grandsons and their descendants, even until the very
dissolution of the universe. But he who
neglects even a part hereof, does evil.
To commit sin, indeed, is easy.
In times past, formerly, there were no morality
officers. Since I was crowned thirteen
years ago, I have appointed morality officers.
They are engaged with votaries of all faiths, for the firm establishment
of morality, for its progress, for the happiness here and hereafter, of those
who are devoted to morality. They are
employed among the Greeks, Kambojas, Gandharas, Rashtrikas,
Petenikas, and among the frontier peoples.
They are employed among the servants and masters, among
Brahmins, the destitute and the aged, for their benefit and happiness, for the
removal of hindrances for those devoted to morality. They are engaged in helping those
incarcerated, in preventing harassment, and in securing release of those who
have large families, or have been overwhelmed with calamity, or are old. Here in Pataliputra or elsewhere, they are
employed in all towns, in all the harems of my brothers, and the establishments
of my sisters and other kinsmen. They
are employed among all those who are devoted to morality, or are established
therein, everywhere in my dominions. For
this purpose has this rescript on morality been written, that it may long
endure, and that my subjects may practice it.
6: King Ashoka says thus: For a long time past, the speedy
dispatch of business and reporting at all times, did not exist. That I have done. At all times, whether I am eating, or in the
women’s apartments, or in the inner chambers, in the cattle-pen or riding, or
in the garden, everywhere reporters are posted, so that they may inform me of
the people’s business. Everywhere, I
transact the people’s business. Whatever
I command orally, whether it concerns a gift or a proclamation, or whatever
that is entrusted to officers, or whenever there is an urgent matter in
dispute, or a deliberation in the Council, the matter may be reported to me
speedily, in all places and times. This
I have commanded. I am never too
satisfied with exertion or the dispatch of business. For I regard the welfare of the people as my
chief duty. The basis of that is
exertion, and the proper dispatch of public business. There is no other work more important than
the welfare of all people. And why? For the discharge of my debt to the people,
so that I may give happiness to some here, and win heaven hereafter. For this purpose, this rescript on morality
has been written, that it may last long, that my sons, grandsons and great
grandsons may exert for the welfare of the entire world. This is most difficult of accomplishment,
except through strenuous effort.
7: King Ashoka desires that all sects may live
everywhere. All of them desire restraint
and purity of the mind. But men are of
diverse desires and passions. They will
practice all (points of their faith), or only a part. Even for a generous man, if he has not
restraint, purity of mind, gratefulness, or steadfastness in faith, there is no
greatness.
8: For a long time past, kings used to go on pleasure tours,
such as hunting and other amusements.
But since he was crowned ten years ago, King Ashoka went on a pilgrimage
(to the place) of Enlightenment of the Lord.
Therein his tour of piety comprised visits to Brahmins and ascetics,
charity, and visits to the Elders (of the Buddhist Order), and gifts of gold,
and visits to the country folk, instruction in the law or morality, and
inquiries pertaining thereto. The
pleasure thereof is great indeed, exceeding any other.
9: King Ashoka says thus: People perform many and diverse
propitious ceremonies. In sickness, or
the marriage of sons and daughters, or for the gift of a son, or for (safety
in) a journey; in these and other matters, people perform diverse propitious
ceremonies. And in this, wives and
mothers particularly indulge in ceremonies that are useless and empty. But ceremonies would be performed, though
such ceremonies are of little value. But
that, indeed, is a very valuable ceremony, namely, the ceremony of
morality. It comprises proper treatment
of slaves and servants, respect toward teachers, restraint toward living
beings, gifts to Brahmins and ascetics, these and many such others are the
ceremony of morality. Now, therefore,
this should be said by a father, or a son, or a master, or a husband, a friend
or an acquaintance, or a neighbor. This
is good; this is the kind of ceremony that should be performed apurpose.
And this too has been said: charity is good. There is no charity or favor (greater) than
the gift of morality or the favor of morality.
And in this, an acquaintance or a friend, or a kinsman, or a companion
should instruct: this should be done, this is good. By this, heaven may be gained. What is more worthy of performing for the
accomplishment of heaven, than this?
10: King Ashoka does not think glory or renown great, but
the renown or glory he may acquire if the people hearken to and act upon the
Law of Morality he has enjoined. For
this alone King Ashoka wishes for glory and renown. Whatever exertion King Ashoka undertakes, it
is solely for the hereafter. And what is
that? That all may be without
blemish. Blemish is sin. That indeed, is difficult of accomplishment
by high or low, except through the highest exertion and renunciation of all
possessions. But his is indeed most
difficult, for one of high rank.
11: King Ashoka says thus: There is no gift like the gift of
morality, praise of morality, sharing of morality, or
kinship with morality. It comprises
proper treatment of slaves and servants, proper support of mother and father,
liberality to friends, relations and kinsmen, Brahmins and ascetics,
non-slaughter of beings. This should be
addressed by a father to his son, brother, or friend, relation or kinsman, or
even by a neighbor: this is good, this should be done. Acting thus, he secures this world and the
next, and acquires infinite merit, by that gift of morality.
12: King Ashoka honors all sectarians and those who have
renounced household life, as well as householders, with liberality and honors
of various kinds. But King Ashoka does
not value gifts or honor for themselves.
Why? For there should be growth
of the Essential among all sects. That
Essential is of many kinds. But the root
of that is restraint in speech.
Why? There should not be
glorification of one’s own sect, and denunciation of the sect of others, for
little or no reason. For all sects are
worthy of reverence, for one reason or another.
Acting thus, one helps grow one’s own sect, and does good to the other’s
sect. Acting otherwise, he belittles his
own sect and does ill to the sect of another.
He who glorifies his own sect and denounces the
sect of another, does so because of love for his own sect. And why?
(That) his own sect may shine brighter.
Acting thus, however, he harms his own sect. Harmony is good. Why?
That people may listen to each other’s doctrine. This is the wish of King Ashoka. What is it?
All sectarians may be learned in the lore of another, and fare well on
the benevolent path. Those who are
pleased with this, should speak thus. King Ashoka considers no liberality or honor
greater that the growth of the Essential of all sects. For this purpose are engaged the morality
officers, and officers in charge of women and herdsmen, and other groups. And this is its fruit: that one’s sect is
advanced, and that moral truth is illumined.
13: Eight years after his coronation, King Ashoka conquered
the Kalingas. In that (conquest), one
hundred and fifty thousand people were deported, one hundred thousand were
killed or maimed, and many times that number died. Thereafter, with the conquest of Kalinga,
King Ashoka (adopted) the practice of morality, love of morality, and
inculcation of morality. For there arose in King Ashoka remorse for the conquest of
Kalinga. For when an unsubdued country
is conquered, there occur such things as slaughter, death and the deportation
of people, and these are regarded as very painful and serious by King
Ashoka. Brahmins and ascetics live
everywhere, as well as votaries of other sects, and householders who practice
such virtues as support of mother and father, service to elders, proper
treatment of friends, relatives, acquaintances and kinsmen and slaves and
servants, and steadfastness in devotion to duties. They, too, suffer injury (separation from
loved ones), slaughter and deportation of loved ones. And for those whose love is undiminished,
their friends, acquaintances, relatives and kinsmen suffer calamity. And that is an injury to them. This plight of men is regarded as serious by
King Ashoka. Outside of the territory of
the Greeks, there is no land where communities such as those of Brahmins and
ascetics are not to be found. Nor is
there any land where men do not have faith in one sect or another.
Hence, whatever the number of men then killed or wounded and
died and were deported at the annexation of Kalinga, a hundredth or a
thousandth part, even, is regarded as serious by King Ashoka. Furthermore, if anyone does wrong, that
person should be suffered, or pardoned.
To the forest folk who live in the royal dominions of King Ashoka, it
may be pointed out that the king, remorseful as he is, has the strength to
punish wrongdoers who do not repent. For
King Ashoka desires that all beings should be safe, self-restrained, tranquil
in thought, and gentle.
King Ashoka considers the victory of morality as the
greatest. And this victory has been
accomplished by King Ashoka, up to all his frontiers, even to a distance of six
hundred yjanas, where the Greek King Antiochus rules, and beyond Antiochus’
realm, in the dominions of the four kings called Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magus and
Alexander, downwards into the dominions of the Cholas and Pandyas, even up to
Tamraparni. Similarly, in the royal
domains where live the Greeks, the Kambojas, Nabhaks, Nabhapantis, Bhojas,
Pitinikas, Andhras and Paridas, everywhere people
follow the instruction in morality by King Ashoka. And wherever the ambassadors of King Ashoka
have fared, there, too, people hear of his moral acts, his teaching and his
instruction on morality, and they follow morality, and will do so.
Whatever has been gained by this victory of morality, that
has been pleasant. This
happiness has been secured through the victory of morality, yet even that is
not as great for King Ashoka, as the gain of the next world. For this purpose this rescript on morality
has been written, that my sons and great grandsons should cease to think of new
conquests, and in all the victories they may gain, they should be content with
forbearance and slight punishment. For
them, the true conquest should be that of morality; all their delight should be
delight in morality, for benefit in this world and the next.
14: This rescript on morality has been commanded to be
written by King Ashoka. Some of it is
short, some medium-length, and other(s) extensive. Everything has not been given
everywhere. For my dominions are large,
wherein much has been commanded to be written and will be written. But some has been repeated again and again,
for its very sweetness, for the people to follow it. In some places, it may be incorrectly written
because of incompleteness, for want of space, or because of damage to the
stone, or an error of the scribe.
Separate Rock Edict 1: By the command of King Ashoka, the
Princes and high officers of Tosali are to be addressed thus: Whatever I
perceive, that I desire to be put into practice by appropriate means. In this I hold my instruction to you, to be
the principal instrument, for you are appointed over thousands of human beings,
in the expectation that you will win the affection of all men. All men are my children. Just as I desire that my children fare well
and be happy in this world and the next, I desire the same for all men ... You
may not comprehend what all this means.
Some individuals may understand this, but some may understand it only in
part and not entirely. You must ensure
this, that this policy is well carried out.
There may be some who may suffer imprisonment or torture, and in some
cases there may be imprisonment without due process, causing suffering and
grief. In this you must follow a course
of moderation in justice. But there may
not be success, because of certain mental blemishes such as envy, the loss of
balance, harshness, impatience, lack of application, sloth and weariness. But you must ensure that you do not display
these blemishes. The basis of the whole
matter lies in preventing the absence of loss of balance, and haste in the
implementation of principles. He who is
slothful is not likely to exert himself.
But you must act, move ahead in your official duties. You must ensure this. And for this, you must be told: discharge the
debt in this wise, King Ashoka advises.
Compliance with these instructions will be very fruitful; non-compliance,
harmful. Non-compliance will secure
neither the next world, nor the service of the king. And why do I emphasize this so much? For your compliance will win you the next
world, and you will discharge your debt to me.
This proclamation must be made on the Tishya constellation
days, and in the interval between the Tishya days, and may be read aloud even
to a single person. Acting in this wise,
you will obey my instructions. This
Edict has been inscribed for this purpose, that the town officers may exert
themselves always, that none be imprisoned or tortured without due
process. To ensure this, I shall
dispatch the high officers on tours of inspection every five years, who are
neither harsh nor wrathful, and are efficient and honest in their acts, for
they will know my intent and act accordingly.
The Prince at Ujjayini, however, shall send out similar inspection teams
every three years. This holds true for
Takshashila, too. The high officers on
their tours of duty, will perform their functions in
the awareness of my instructions.
Separate Rock Edict 2: (Beginning text similar to
Separate Rock Edit 1) ... The unsubdued frontier peoples may wonder what the
king designs for them. But my desire
toward them is that they should understand that the king will forgive them, as
far as it is possible to forgive. For my sake, they should practice the
Law of Morality and win this world and next.
For this, I instruct you thus.
This is the way to make you understand my will, my resolve and promise,
and discharge my debt to the people.
Thus should you act.
The people must be assured, so that they may think that the king
is to us even as a father, he feels for us even as he feels for himself, for we
are to him even as his children. My
resolve is firm and so is my promise, and I command unto you my will and my
instruction. My messengers and special
officers will contact you soon. For you
are able to assure the frontier peoples, and ensure their welfare in this world
and next. Acting thus, you will gain the
next world and discharge your debt to me.
For this purpose has this Edict has been commanded to be written, that
my high officers may engage themselves for all the future, in inspiring the
frontier peoples and making them advance in the Law of Morality. This should be proclaimed by recitation, on
the Tishya day in all seasons and months, and also in the intervals. On special occasions, it may be recited even
to one person. Acting in this wise, you
will comply with my instructions.
Minor Rock Edict 1: From Suvarnagiri, by order of the Prince
and high officers, the high officers of Isila are to be wished well and
addressed as follows: for more than two and one-half years since I have been a
lay-devotee, I have not been exerting myself energetically. But for over a year since I approached the
Order, I have been exerting myself strenuously.
In this time, men who were separate from the gods in Jambudvipa have now
mingled with them. This, verily, is the
result of exertion. And this may be
accomplished, not by the great alone.
For even a smaller man through his exertion can accomplish the great
heaven. For this purpose this message is
proclaimed: that the great and small alike may exert themselves, that even the
frontier peoples may know about it, and that such great exertion may long endure. This will increase and further increase, at
least one and one-half times.
And for this purpose this must be written on rocks. This must be spread all over your
jurisdiction. This proclamation I have
made while on a tour for 256 nights.
Minor Rock Edict 2: King Ashoka says this: Mother and Father
must be shown due respect; likewise the elders; proper regard for living beings
must be firmly established, truth must be spoken. These values of morality must be propounded:
pupils must honor teachers; kinsmen must be well regarded. This is the ancient law of long duration;
this must be practiced. Written by the
scribe Chapada.
Bairat Stone Inscription: Ashoka, the Magadhan King salutes
the (Buddhist) Order, and wishes them good health and comfort.
Sirs, you are aware of my reverence and faith in the Buddha,
the Dhamma and the Saga. Whatever has
been said by the Lord Buddha, has been well said. However, Reverend Sirs, it occurs to
me that the good doctrine may long endure, the following passages of the good
doctrine may be especially pointed out, to wit: The Vinaya Glorified, the
Powers of the Elect, the Dangers of the Unknown, the Song of the Sage, the
Discourse on Seclusion, the Question of Upatishya, the Advice to Rahula on
Falsehood spoken by the Lord Buddha. I
desire that many monks and nuns may listen to and meditate upon these, and so
should the male and female lay-devotees.
For this purpose, Sirs, I cause this to be written, in order that people
may know my wishes.
Barabar Hill Cave Inscriptions: Since he was crowned twelve
years ago, King Ashoka gave this Banyan Cave to Ajivikas.
Since he was crowned twelve years ago King Ashoka gave this
cave in the Khalatika Mountain to the Ajivikas.
Since he was crowned nineteen years ago King Ashoka
declares: “I have given this cave in the very pleasant Khalatika Mountain.”
Samchi-Sarnath-Kaushambi
Edict: To the high officials (of Pataliputra and Kaushambi), this is the
command of King Ashoka: “I have united the Order. No one, monk or nun, shall split the
Order. Whosoever, monk or nun, causes a
schism in the Order, shall be made to wear white garments and expelled from the
community.” This command should be proclaimed
to the Order of the monks and nuns. King
Ashoka says this: such an order must be posted on the highways within your
jurisdiction. A copy of this should be
made available to the lay-devotees. On
the fasting days, the lay-devotees should familiarize themselves with this
order. Within your jurisdiction, you
should expel the schismatic. Similarly,
you must ensure the expulsion of the schismatic in all forts and districts, in
accordance with this command.
It is my desire that during the times of my sons and great
grandsons, even so long as the sun and the moon endure, the Order may live
completely united.
Kandahar Inscription (Greek version): Ten years after his
coronation, King Ashoka instructed the people in morality. After that, he made the people practice
morality more and more.
There is prosperity in all the world.
The king refrains from violence to living beings, as do the
others, and even the hunters and fishermen refrain from killing.
Those that were unrestrained, have
practiced restraint, as much as it was possible for them to do.
Obedience to father and mother and elders has in the past
led to a better life, and will do so in future, with the practice of the rules
given above.
Kandahar Inscription (Aramaic version): Ten years after his
coronation King Ashoka began to follow the true pattern of life. After that, evil decreased for all men, and
misfortune disappeared due to the exertion of the king.
There was peace and happiness all over the earth. And this also happened, namely: the few
animals that were slaughtered for royal food, have not
been slaughtered, and even the fishermen have been commanded to desist from
fishing.
Those who were unrestrained, now practice restraint. There is obedience to father and mother and
elders, as ordained, and all those devoted to morality live confidently.
All of this has benefited all men, and will do so in future.
Rummindie Pillar Inscription: Here worshipped King Ashoka
when he was crowned twenty years ago, for here was born the Buddha, the sage of
the Shakyas. A figure of an elephant and
a stone pillar were set up. And because
the Blessed One was born here, the village of Lumbini was exempted from taxes
and partook of prosperity.
Nigali Sager Pillar Inscription: Since he was crowned
fourteen years ago, King Ashoka enlarged the Stupa of the former Buddha
Konagamana for the second time. And
after twenty years since he was crowned, he came here in person to offer
worship and set up a stone pillar.
Queen’s Edict: By the command of King Ashoka, the high
officials everywhere are to be addressed thus.
Whatever gift is given by the Second Queen, to wit: mango-grove, garden,
or almshouse, or any other, is to be regarded as her gift. These must be reckoned as the gifts of the
Second Queen Kuruvaki, the mother of Tivara.
Pillar Edict 1: King Ashoka says thus: This rescript on
morality has been commended to be written by me, since I was crowned twenty-six
years ago. Happiness in this world and
the next is difficult to achieve, except through utmost devotion to morality,
keen introspection, complete obedience, fear of evil,
and great exertion. Now, because of my
instruction, this reliance on morality and devotion to it have increased daily,
and will increase. My officers, too,
whether of the highest, the middling, or of low rank, must follow my
instruction and practice it, so that they may encourage the weak or hesitant as
much as they can. Similarly the high
officers of the frontiers must act. And
this should be the norm of conduct, that administration must conform to morality,
that legislation should be according to morality; this alone can make people
happy according to morality, and protect them according to the law of morality.
Pillar Edict 2: King Ashoka says thus: Morality is
good. But what is morality? Few blemishes, much merit; compassion,
liberality, truth and purity. Of my
gifts there are many kinds, for I have given the gift of eyes (truth), and I
have conferred many benefits on bipeds and quadrupeds alike, even unto birds
and creatures that live in the waters, even to the extent of the gift of
life. And I have done benevolent deeds
of many other kinds. For this purpose
this rescript on morality is commanded to be written, that it may be acted upon
and may last long. He
who accomplishes this, does good.
Pillar Edict 3: King Ashoka says thus: One sees only good
actions; I have done this good deed. One
does not see evil; I have done this evil, or that this is a blemish. These are difficult to notice. But one should see this: that anger,
ruthlessness, wrath, pride, envy, all these result in evil. May these not cause my degradation. And this must be
seen especially, this is beneficial to me, in this world and the next.
Pillar Edict 4: King Ashoka says thus: Since I was crowned
twenty-six year ago, I have commanded this rescript on morality to be
written. My officers are appointed (to
rule) over many hundreds of thousands of people. I have given them freedom in judging cases
and inflicting punishments. Why? Because these officers must function fearlessly
and confidently, and strive to ensure the benefit and happiness of city people
and country folk; that they shall show favor to people, and comprehend what
caused happiness or suffering to them.
And they shall instruct the city people and the country folk in the
principles of morality, so that a beneficial here and hereafter may be
ensured. These officers are keen to
serve me, and will instruct their agents about my intentions. And they shall inform the officers about the
ways in which the officers may act to please me. For even as a man who has given over his
child to the care of a skillful nurse says, “the skillful nurse is energetic
enough to look after my child’s happiness”; so the officers have been appointed
to ensure the benefit and happiness of the country folk, in the expectation
that they may perform their functions fearlessly, confidently, quietly, and
without distraction. For this I have
granted my officers freedom in judging cases and inflicting punishments.
This much is desirable.
And what is that? Equality in
judicial proceedings, and equality in penalties. And henceforth, this is my rule: that to
those in prison, condemned to death, a grace period of three days has been
granted by me. For during this time,
their kinsmen will urge them to ponder over the possibility of sparing their
life; or in case there is none to do this, then to meditate, give charity, or
perform acts of fasting for the next life.
For this is my desire: that even in this short time, they may serve the
next world, and that among people, the practice of morality of various kinds
may grow, to wit: self-restraint and the distribution of charity.
Pillar Edict 5: King Ashoka says thus: Since I was crowned
twenty-six years ago, I have made inviolate the species, to wit: parrots,
starlings, arunas, brahmany ducks, wild geese, nandimukhas, gelatas, bats,
queen ants, terrapins, boneless fish, vedaveyakas, gangapuputakas, skate,
turtles, squirrels, Borasting stags, Brahmany bulls, rhinoceros, white pigeons,
common pigeons, all quadrupeds that are not in use or are not eaten. Similarly she-goats, ewes and sows, whether
young or milch, are inviolable; also young ones
within six months of age, are not to be killed.
Cocks must not be caponed. Husks
with living things in them, must not be burnt.
Forests must not be burnt, just for mischief or to destroy living things
in them. Life must not be fed on
life. On the three seasonal full moon
days, and on full moon days of the month of Tichya,
for three days in each instance, to wit: the fourteenth and fifteenth days of
the first half of the lunar month, and the first day of the second half of the
lunar month, as well as on fast days through the whole year, fish must not be
killed or sold. During these days, in
the elephant-forests and fishponds, no other species of animal must be
destroyed.
On the eighth day, the fourteenth day and the fifteenth day
in each fortnight, as well as on the Tishya and Punarvasu days, no bulls must
be castrated, nor must goats, rams, boars or other animals be castrated.
On the Tishya and Punarvasu days, on the seasonal full-moon
days, and during the fortnight of the seasonal full moons, horses and kine must not be branded.
Since I was crowned twenty-six years ago, I have granted twenty-five
jail deliveries.
Pillar Edict 6: King Ashoka says thus: Since I was crowned
twenty-two years ago, I have commanded rescripts on morality to be written for
the benefit and happiness of the world, so that the giving up of old ways may
lead to the advancement of morality.
This do I desire, the benefit and happiness of the world. To wit, I may accomplish the happiness and
welfare of some of my relatives and persons near and far, for which I may
provide accordingly. In the same manner,
I regard all communities. I have honored
all sects by diverse acts of worship.
But this is the chief thing, namely, personal attention to the needs of
the people. Since I was crowned
twenty-six years ago, I have commanded this rescript on morality to be written.
Pillar Edict 7: King Ashoka says thus: In times past, Kings
used to desire thus. How shall we make
the people progress in morality? But the
people did not progress appropriately in morality. But how may the people be encouraged to act
so that they progress in morality? In
what way can I help at least some of them to progress in morality? In this King Ashoka says thus. “This occurred to me. I shall cause the proclamation of morality to
be proclaimed; I shall cause instruction in morality to be given so that people
may practice it, and will advance themselves in it, and thus will grow mightily
the law of morality.”
For this purpose proclamations on morality have been made,
instructions of diverse kinds in morality commanded; so that my agents,
appointed to rule a multitude of people, may expound and expand my
teachings. My officers, too, set over
many hundreds of thousands of men, have also been commanded by me thus:
Instruct in this, and thus the people (will be) devoted to morality.
King Ashoka says thus: With this very intention, have I set
up monuments to morality, appointed morality officers, and caused proclamations
of morality.
King Ashoka says thus: On the highways, banyan trees have
been planted so that they may afford shade to men and animals, mango-groves have
been planted, wells have been dug at an interval of every half a kos, resting
places have been set up, watering-places have been established, for the benefit
of animals and men. But the joy thereof
has been slight indeed. In many ways,
kings in the past, as well as I, have attempted to comfort the world. I have done this in the desire that they may
practice morality.
King Ashoka says thus: My morality officers have engaged
themselves in acts of royal benevolence in diverse ways. They are engaged among those who have
renounced the world, as well as the householders, and among all sects. I have ordered them to be engaged in the
welfare of the Order, and also the welfare of Brahmins, Ajivikas, Nigranthas
and other sects.
These high officers will engage themselves in their diverse
and respective duties, whereas the morality officers are engaged specifically
among all denominations, in addition to other duties.
King Ashoka says thus: These, and many other officers, are
engaged in distribution of royal charity, on my account as well as on the
Queen’s account, and in all the royal households, here and in the provinces;
also in dispensing charity on behalf of my sons and other princes, so as to
promote meritorious acts and encourage the practice of morality; so that
compassion, generosity, truth, mindfulness, gentleness and goodness will
progress among mankind.
King Ashoka says thus: Whatever good I have done, has indeed
been accomplished for the progress and welfare of the world. By these shall grow virtues, namely: proper
support of mother and father, regard for preceptors and elders, proper
treatment of Brahmins and ascetics, of the poor who are destitute, slaves and
servants.
King Ashoka says thus: Men have been enabled to progress in
morality by two means, namely: by moral regulation and persuasion. But regulations are of little effect, whereas
persuasion is of higher efficacy.
I have made diverse moral regulations, such as declaring
classes of being inviolate; and many other kinds of moral regulations have I
promulgated. By persuasion I have
accomplished the growth of morality among men, through non-violence and the
non-slaughter of creatures. That has
been done for this purpose, namely: in the time of my sons and grandsons, even
as long as the sun and moon endure, this shall be practiced. Doing this, this world and the next may be
secured. Since I was crowned
twenty-seven years ago, have I commanded this rescript on morality to be written.
King Ashoka says thus: Wherever there are stone pillars or slabs, there these rescripts on morality must be inscribed, so that it may long endure.
“Could I tranquilly see my fellow-men walking [about] like idiots in
every imaginable direction, except that alone in which the happiness they were
in search of could be found?” Robert
Owen, New Lanark, Cole, 108, taken
from The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen,
by A.L. Morton, Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 61.
Graham Gwynn and Tony Wright, Left in
the Dark, Kaleidos Press, 2008. www.leftinthedark.org.uk. The following is a summary of this text.
From its inception some seventy million years ago, humanity had
enjoyed a diet of jungle fruit easily digestible and rich in flavenoids. This optimal diet inhibited the harmful
effects of steroids and MAOs in the human body, stimulated pineal gland
activity, and induced a physiological feedback loop that further inhibited
steroid activity, lengthened the prepubescent growth period (the more advanced
the species, the longer its prepubescent growth) and tripled the volume of the
human brain, in an extremely short time span from an evolutionary point of
view. During this period, humanity’s
thought processes were perfected on the basis of two co-equal brain hemispheres
functioning in parallel and balanced sanity.
Unfortunately, from 200,000 to 12,000 years ago, humanity was
forced to adapt to a much less hospitable environment. Something induced the catastrophic
constriction of the human gene pool to a handful of surviving female
bloodlines. Thanks to humanity’s
overgrown brain capacity, it survived this transition from a diet of lush
arboreal fruit, to the savanna equivalent of tubers and seeds, then ice-age
animal flesh. These forced diets induced
a cumulative deterioration of intellectual capacity without any corresponding
physiological evolution. We remained
exactly the same species, just ate different foods and thought less ably.
This nutritional deviation increased the influence of testosterone
on the human body (both male and female), which induced a cascade of mental
retardation that accentuated the human sleep cycle, shut down the brain’s right
hemisphere in favor of the left (linear thinking and short-term memory over
holistic thought and long-term processing), and based human behavior on
restrictive fear instead of holistic understanding.
According to the conclusions of this book, we are the
brain-crippled survivors of the transition from a physiologically optimal diet
of arboreal fruit, to less and less advantageous ones (ending in the absolutely
worthless junk food of today), which brought about a spiraling decay in our
values and behavior.
The ancient legend of humanity’s Fall from grace is actually a
nutritional one, from optimal brain food to more and more detrimental ones and
ensuing behavioral aberration… About
which we’ve not had a clue up ‘til now.
The still, small voice we hear from so rarely (and too often mistake for
the voice of God) is that of our entombed right brain.
In her great book, The March of
Folly, Barbara Tuchman examines cognitive
dissonance. By her definition, cognitive dissonance is a bureaucracy’s
(and its society’s) tendency to abandon common sense, good conscience and
long-term self-interest in favor of policies that violate these precepts. Cognitive dissonance takes the lead even
though many warnings counsel against it.
Her prerequisites for cognitive dissonance include:
·
lust for power,
·
excessive power,
·
mental standstill and stagnation,
·
persistence in error, and
·
protective stupidity (refusal to heed warnings).
The consequences of cognitive dissonance are:
·
social suicide replaces reason, (as when the Trojans welcomed the
Trojan Horse into their city and did not post guards around it while they
celebrated their imaginary victory; Congress tallies its fossil fuel campaign
contributions instead of addressing global warning);
·
social instruments abandon their appointed tasks and become
institutions, (the Renaissance Papacy pursued wealth and power instead of
religious reform, Congress pursues campaign finance instead of the public
benefit); and
·
leaders enslave themselves to preconceived ideas: (America’s
defeat in Vietnam, the self-defeating War on Drugs, the current prison empires,
the collapse of Soviet leadership, the military quagmire everyone in a position
of authority said would never happen in Iraq or Afghanistan, etc.).
The March of Folly has no chapter describing a
self-critical government, even an exceptional one. Weapons administrations stroke, congratulate
and perpetuate themselves, even during intervals of obvious collapse.
Ms. Tuchman mentioned the 1981 martyrdom of Mohammed Anwar
el-Sadat. As President of Egypt, he made
the unpopular decision to negotiate peace with Israel and was assassinated for
his pains. A few decades later, for exactly
the same reasons, exactly the same type of creep
on the opposite side murdered his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin.
Standard weapon policies are only held in check by inefficient
exploitation, muddled methods, mental inertia, obstacles of protocol and
squabbling over spoils. Since misguided
leaders insist on doing things the wrong way from the get go, institutional
inefficiency lessens their ill effects.
This, despite Mom’s dictum: “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
This is where the 1984 Syndrome
comes from. Since everyone has been
talked into believing that government is always malicious; we should keep it as
weak and stupid as possible, to lessen its malice. Unfortunately, stupid governments are also
the most malicious and have the greatest appetite for growth. Also, the most devoted adherents to this idea
(Republicans and Independents) are by definition the worst managers, since they
forgive themselves in advance for every criminal misdeed and incompetence.
What The March of Folly calls
cognitive dissonance: a rare aberration, Learners
calls ritual stupidity: a constant in
weapon management.
The real activities of most public institutions are usually
irrational. Even if their basic charter
is rational, their bureaucrats make a point of contradicting it. Ms. Tuchman admits as much. She concludes that we can only muddle
“through patches of brilliance and decline.”
According to her, the only body that could hope to overcome cognitive
dissonance would be an electorate so well informed, it would value moral
courage above material gain—a vanishing rarity these days. Growing such a cosmopolitan world citizenry
would be a basic Learner objective.
“Epic poems, inscriptions on
monuments, treaties of peace—nearly all historical documents bear the same
character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
Of those solemn documents, many have justified crimes against
humanity. Under the lofty tenets of
Stalin’s Constitution, his officials killed more Russians than the Nazis
did. Militant Chinese exponents of Mao’s Quotations condemned more Chinese
than did Japanese imperialists. The
originators and supporters of France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man
betrayed it, from the Terror to massacres in Indochina, Algeria and
post-colonial Africa, (Rwanda in particular).
Now, this semi-fascistic stupidity has sunk to the level of prohibiting
good little girls from wearing
religious symbols in public school.
What next?
As for the Preamble of the American Constitution and its Bill of
Rights; well! Witness the prison empire
abuilding around us, and the standing army royally bankrolled to protect
it. What more Constitutional distortions
will the American Empire stipulate; what more abominations will we need to
witness before the truth dawns?
May God forgive those who misread Learners to justify more
crimes against humanity. That’s quite likely, though hopefully
rare. They should figure out that weapon
mentality has once again suckered them, when an outraged World Court lands atop
them with both feet. If the World Court
becomes just as corrupt; well, that's why there should be a sovereign World
Agora and a World Militia, to detect this
insanity right away and stop it at gunpoint on our doorsteps.
In fact, cognitive dissonance typifies human behavior. We practice all too rarely what we
preach. In this ‘real world,’ we
compartmentalize our feelings. Certain
plots, characters and settings trigger trust, compassion, cooperation and
amity, (towards family, clan, co-citizens, co-religionists and language
peers). Meanwhile, others (dealing with
the homeless or immigrants, for example) shrivel into fear, untruth and
violence by proxy.
We may correct this double vision by polishing the clouded lenses
of our weapon/peace dialectic.
Let’s picture two men: Mr. Stoic and Mr. Nerves. When Mr. Stoic hurts himself, he secretes
endorphin pain suppressers that let him function at minimal efficiency. In addition, he practices the stoicism our
weapon philosophers love to revere.
This social stoicism promotes insane public policies; it generates
the bureaucracy Barbara Tuchman describes in detail. Decisions descend from the top, in isolation
from reality; they dictate capricious desires that may or may not be
practicable on the ground; that may contradict survival instincts, local
capabilities and moral precept. Who
cares? No one directly involved will be
consulted. Middle managers will execute
those decisions anyway, under the threat of summary removal. Reasonable objectors will be pruned from the
decision tree. This pruning is every
bureaucracy’s favorite pastime; ritually and automatically, it makes it all the
more stupid.
Mr. Nerves swoons at the first sight of blood not to mention major
injury. Deep-sunk in blackout, his shock
endures until his subconscious stipulates that new conditions may be
survivable. While Mr. Nerves remains
passed out, his psyche mulls its options at leisure.
Debate, argumentation and consensus building govern nervous
policy-making. The longer it takes to
reach consensus, the longer the delay between its actions. Nervous and pluralistic administrations
compromise, vacillate and delay. No one
commits firmly to any position until everyone has staked a claim. As more and more voices join the debate,
delays stretch out forever. The more
data collected, the longer each decision takes.
Taking two steps forward and three steps back, executive organizations
gather information, then process it for revealed truth, announce their
decisions, survey outcomes, rethink, determine the next course of action,
etc.
Either that or the most opinionated minority makes arbitrary
decisions and then ignores harmful consequences: a simpler, more common
practice. When decision-making
deadlocks, short-term greed becomes the tiebreaker, the final arbiter of
overcrowded debate.
Let’s discuss three weapon management cure-alls: discipline,
morale, and glory. Military
disciplinarians apply just enough brutality to short-circuit the common sense
and rational self-interest of their recruits.
‘High’ unit morale allows its subordinates to sacrifice themselves when
push comes to shove. ‘Glory’ occurs when
discipline is so well adjusted that all but a few military leaders (well
insulated by distance and stupidity) submit to being massacred—often for no
valid reason.
Good combat units must endure heavy casualties yet remain
aggressive. They must attack without
hesitation, even if they are checked, forced back and chased. In certain cases, they should submit to
annihilation against impossible odds.
After all, personal disaster is the only outcome for anyone killed
or maimed in battle. It does not matter
how ‘glorious’ his sacrifice was. In
short, all military personnel – from pot scrubbers to supreme commanders – must
commit cognitive dissonance on demand.
That’s a difficult state of mind for a State to achieve. Military hierarchies operate in a fog of
cognitive dissonance as a matter of routine.
Yet even they have a hard time maintaining it. Therefore, weapon states must pamper masters
of cognitive dissonance and marginalize the insightful, the critical, and the
outspoken. From the info-proletariat’s
ignorant grumblings to the pinnacles of epic myth, cardboard facades of
enlightened civilization must be founded on dense footings of ritual
stupidity. This foundation is so commonplace, it has become invisible to us.
Weapon states have learned to mask their overt aggression in times
of peace. Instead, racial and domestic
violence become routine; sports and popular culture glorify brutal
competition. The proletariat finds less
and less legitimate work, which boosts crime.
In pursuit of short-term profits to pay off titanic war taxes, humans
pit themselves against each other and conspire against their environment. In a flash of resource depletion, eons of
ingrained reverence for nature are abandoned.
Mass consumerism, personal littering and institutional pollution
prevail. Excessive sexual restraints,
religious intolerance, and alcohol/drug criminalization multiply aggression
conveniently.
Pain – humanity’s most faithful companion – has long reinforced
historical stoicism. Despite our
braggart medical community, rich and poor alike suffer from poorly mended
fractures, toothaches, chronic irritations and allergies, digestive disorders,
psychiatric emergencies and wounds induced by accident, crime, battle,
self-infliction, medical incompetence or idiopathy.
Our bodies are cumulatively poisoned through toxic, misunderstood
and poorly taught nutrition.
Disinformation is the bread and butter of food processing
mega-corporations. In truth, their only
real intention is to mass-produce battlefield rations: the most toxic and
profitable foodstuffs ever produced.
In the past, elder warriors suffered more pain than most people;
their perks let them outlive lesser folk despite battlefield trauma and the
aches and pains of old age.
Indeed, the archaic 'superiority' of nobles over peasants may be
traced to their long-standing monopoly of hunting privileges. They ate more animal protein. Peasant children grew up on vegetables and
grain gruel. Their maturing brains never
got enough protein to grow and compete successfully. Same goes for slaves and masters; the same
goes for us. The cultural stagnation of
certain modern nations and minorities can be traced back to inadequate
nutrition (especially lack of iodine in their salt.) We could reverse it virtually overnight. Another confirmation of our weapon
degeneracy: that we failed to fix this problem planet-wide, even though we have
held the means to do so for generations.
People who cannot take care of themselves are more expensive to
keep alive. People
who can do so, produce dependable profits on their own. Poverty is the most expensive social policy
on Earth.
Aside from cannabis, willow bark, mandrake, hypnosis, acupuncture
and poppy sap in advanced localities, effective painkillers were very rare in
the past. Leaders, especially hereditary
leaders, made important decisions while beset by atrocious pain.
If you have been lucky enough to have avoided this kind of pain,
trust my experience. Otherwise good
people become perfect brutes under lengthy dazzles of pain; their reason
abdicates to anger and cruelty.
Alcohol was the painkiller of choice long before more powerful
analgesics were discovered. The
combination of pain and alcohol abuse annuls social grace.
Alcohol may also help with digestion. Like carbon dioxide bubbles in soft drinks,
it kills many food microbes harmful to digestion and the blood. In this way, it allows populations with no
better means – there are much better ones, up to Learners to find – to purify
their gut from time to time. Also, to
clean wounds and soothe troubled minds.
A social philosopher whose name escapes me hypothesized that
societies use alcohol to sort out their people.
After all, alcohol is merely a concentrate of grain or fruit:
complementary to basic sustenance if produced from its surplus or detrimental
if produced despite its dearth. It would
provide a significant surplus to survival requirements for families operating
on the margin and deciding whether or not to consume it: a real extra, above
and beyond basic necessities for poor families both ancient and modern.
Those who abstained from alcohol could use the extra income as
collateral for productive enterprise during good times and as a survival margin
in times of famine; whereas those who wasted it on excessive drinking would pin
themselves to the lower class in good times and croak faster in those of
famine, they and their family. Ancient
societies that forbade alcohol became more rigid and fixed by forsaking that
surplus and their families’ option to use it, whereas societies that permitted
its consumption promoted the upward mobility of families by merit, if only
indirectly.
Also, in millions of man-to-man confrontations, the soberer sword
combatant would have cleaved the slower drunkard who had drunk his fill before
battle to compensate for his fear of what would come next. Was that the Q’ran-dictated margin of victory
of Muslim Arabs over Byzantine, Persian and Hindu armies that each outnumbered
them by ten or more to one?
Another social philosopher, whose name I can’t recall either, had
this other thing to say. He concluded
that dynamic societies force women (and men, though he didn’t mention them) who
don’t want to have children, to make babies.
Permissive societies produced less gifted children, became less
productive and degenerated accordingly, since they allowed neurologically
gifted people to drift into celibacy (and homosexual intimacy, again
unmentioned) and since ‘sensual’ women would be the only ones to have children
in those societies.
According to this model, chemical birth control would produce the
worst form of social decay. Another
favorite reactionary prejudice. Even
though he, a Victorian Britisher, only spoke of religious sexual segregation,
as I recall.
In this model, the same brutal constraints employed to produce
more children, would also be used against them during their upbringing, (also
against women, social inferiors and whomever else it could lay its hands on) to
make them fiercer. Meanwhile, social
indulgence would have mollycoddled more babies, turned them into decadent
peaceniks who couldn’t defend themselves militarily against the former group
with its merciless constraints.
In many warlike societies (such as the Roman) it was illegal and
even sacrilegious for highborn citizens to avoid having children—adoption was
compulsory in the most extreme cases.
For what it’s worth.
In addition, I would never have written up any of this, or
outreached to others to get them to read it, without the divine lubricant of
alcohol. I would have been too bound-up
by my weapon indoctrination to defy it without the psychic emancipation of
drink. My spirit, dead sober and
unmodulated by the resonance of psychoactive drugs, might have found tolerable
the murderous platitudes of weapon mentality. I suspect that a lot of cultural creativity
springs from the same source. Look at
Hemingway’s work and that of other artists.
The history of Russian elites and that of alcohol abusers share
many symptoms. These include intense
suspicion, periodic withdrawal, violent outbursts, destructive self-criticism,
poor self-imaging, temporary repentance, improved behavior, worsening lapses,
alternately doting and abusive treatment of co-dependents, frenzied outbursts
interspersed with bottomless apathy, meticulous planning followed by
indifference to outcomes, brilliant beginnings and clumsy follow-up. We might include both patients’ willingness
to betray true friends and bearers of good advice.
Unfailing friendliness (metta in Buddha’s
Pali language) is considered the supreme Buddhist virtue. It is also the first personal habit weapon
managers suppress in the name of loyalty to their institutions.
“This is not a popularity contest.
You have a serious job to do. Now
go out there and hurt somebody bad, then report back to me. Dismissed!”
WeaponWorld talk.
These traits characterize every weapon state, even though
centuries of Anglo-Saxon propaganda have fixed them as Russian
stereotypes. Such typical human
behaviors occur chaotically, in parallel on different scales, from abusive
siblings, mismatched mates, spiteful clerks and tyrannical desk sergeants, up
to the highest rungs of power.
On PeaceWorld, this WeaponWorld speech, “This is not…” would
likely go something like this: “Have you
made a new friend or helped a stranger today?
How many? Here is the sustenance
you need to assist them in peace. If
not, go back out there, find them and absolve us of the disgrace of not having
helped them.” A roman emperor is quoted
as having said, regretfully: “Today, I helped no one.” I would call him great, except that he
flattened Jerusalem and who knows how many more communities?
A case can be made, that Industrial Era leaders not only drank to
excess but did so from lovely, lead glass decanters—thus poisoning themselves
synergistically with alcohol and lead, and their world with pointless
violence. High-flying propaganda and
institutional inertia justified this stupidity to every poisoned drunkard’s
satisfaction—and to ours, today.
Ancient Greek, Roman, and modern information elites suffered
similar poisoning. Acidic water and wine
were served to them from leaden and lead-soldered vessels. Classy private homes collected rainwater from
lead-covered roofs; others, lesser, were covered with copper or ceramic. Thus, the richer they grew and the more they
ate and drank, the dumber they got.
Poor people ate and drank from wooden and clay vessels. They did not suffer from this problem except
indirectly through the poor decisions of their social superiors. Even though, now that I think of it, all
their famous viaducts were lead-sealed.
This chronic poisoning would have been enough to collapse a
civilization. Each new problem would
have received dumber solutions, spiced with reflexive terrorism. Sound familiar?
What’s our excuse? Three
times as much background radiation?
Maybe. A million times more
dioxin, antibiotics and metabolic hormones double-parked in our food, air,
drink and body fat? Perhaps. Or could it be our rote repetition of hypnotic weapon myths? Could we find their antidote here, among
Learners?
The recreational consumption of psychoactive drugs (minus alcohol)
actuates a different set of social symptoms involving decadence. When otherwise energetic people take
recreational drugs, they tend to withdraw from productive materialism into
mysticism, art, passive denial and asocial indifference. The extent of their withdrawal depends on the
dosage and types of the drugs they take.
Adults often use these drugs as low-stress boredom
relievers—trying to compensate for their failure to entertain their subjects of passion and cooperate with social
groups equally obsessed. Roller coasters
and dating, for example, are high-stress boredom relievers. Combat is the ultimate boredom reliever for
society as a whole, as are other risk-taking activities.
Legalized, the social effects of recreational drug use are
value-neutral and perhaps beneficial. Drug
use, however, dangerously weakens a weapon state. This is especially true if the craved drug is
grown, processed, and/or distributed by foreigners and thus eventual
enemies.
Ideally, these drugs should be cheap, legal, locally grown and
administered hygienically. If so, their
side effects would be less harmful than those induced by the compensatory abuse
of tobacco laced with toxic additives, alcohol, caffeine, bleached flour,
processed sugar and sugar substitutes; not to mention police Prohibition, crime
both organized commensal (that feeds at the same table), and every violation of
human rights these august bodies bring to the table.
Mohammed’s injunctions against gambling and drinking helped shift
his Islamic brethren toward social justice.
·
Social justice might equal public health plus extras. Could it be proportionate to public health?
·
Would the consumption of alcohol be the public health equivalent
of washing one’s hands five times a day?
·
What would equal washing the feet of one’s enemy?
·
In courts of justice, perhaps…
·
Washing a tired stranger’s feet as a social routine: what would
that equal to?
Early Islam wrested giant info proletariats from the control of
weapon elites undefeatable otherwise.
The Koran offered greater wisdom than the dogmatic injustice of prior
weapon religions and their potentates.
Long before Learners, God through Mohammed’s voice divided
the world into a House of Peace (lodging those who agree with its tenets) and a
House of War (their opponents). One need
not be a practicing Muslim to belong to the House of Peace, just let Muslims
practice their faith in peace. It is
certain that Allah prefers the House of Peace and abominates the other. No wise Muslim, nor Mohammed himself, would
contradict this conclusion. I may be
nothing more than a wine-bibbing kafir, but this truth is apparent even to me.
Practicing Muslims will grasp the significance of Learners’ weapon/peace antinomy much
faster than “Judeo-Christian” philosophers for whom the term “peace” is just
another meaningless fill-word in their Testaments.
Later, more worldly Muslims cancelled their philosophical
advantage by drinking themselves silly and ruling accordingly. Even later, Sunni and Shia weapon sectarians
defiled the Koran by spilling each other’s blood. Reflexively, they fulfilled their weapon
goals in disobedience of the peaceful intent of the Qran. Their blasphemous violence was based on
tribal pecking orders, geographical pissing matches and ethnic bigotry, rather
than any counsel contained in the Koran.
Justifying and regulating this forbidden mayhem may have been the
primary purpose of tafseer
commentaries.
I am not qualified to comment further. Muslim Learners should do so in my place, loudly!
The combination of alcohol and powerful mind-altering substances
produces more and more psychotic and violent behavior, as pre-Columbian and
Scythian blood cults demonstrate. The
ultimate consequence of this twin fixation appears to be mass cannibalism and
ritual human sacrifice. No thanks, pass.
To those who indulge in psychoactive drugs, including blessed
Cannabis, I recommend that you not have partaken of alcohol recently. The optimal combination would be the least
alcohol with the strongest psychoactivity.
Those who want to entertain the most constructive form of psychoactivity
should join a brotherhood that strictly bans the consumption of alcohol.
But from this, to forbid laypeople the pleasure of a few
pipe-loads and of a glass or two of good wine that stains red, shared from time
to time among friends – as long as those things have obviously grown from good
soil (thus, no generic white powders, clear liquids that taste of no fruit on
earth, or other deadly laboratory stimulants) – that’s too great a sacrifice to
demand of people! Celebrated most things
in moderation as long as no harm arises.
City-based agriculture and urban tyranny are thought to have
evolved hand-in-hand. Sedentary farmers
produced crop surpluses impossible to trade beyond the local weather
frontier. Cities were established along
waterways bisecting these frontiers. In
other words, everyone shared local weather – thus surpluses or dearth –
simultaneously. Only overdeveloped
transportation networks could shift farm surpluses any distance from their
district of origin.
In the absence of cheap bulk transport, something had to be done
to preserve unmarketable surpluses. It
was neither wise nor safe to gorge in years of plenty and starve during the bad
ones. Some way had to be found to level
this nutritional roller coaster. Surplus
perishables could be preserved until years of famine by extending their shelf
life.
Fermentation helped ‘solve’ this problem.
Up to that point, human hunting packs would have operated much
like wolves. They’d have shared
merit-based leadership, self-enforced honesty, equitable food and labor
distribution, automatic reproductive restraints, permanent controls against
internal violence, and maximal care for a few youngsters very carefully raised
by the whole community. Over a stretch
of eons, marginal conditions destroyed any pack that deviated from this norm of
excellence.
We have been bred for behavioral excellence a thousand times
longer than for weapon mentality.
Let’s ignore for a moment the philosophical quibbles, knee-jerk
nihilism and existential doubts that entangle us these days. Real morality increases the likelihood of
long-term species survival by reducing the harm of unintended consequences on a
probabilistic basis. Bad behavior
produces worse results more often than good behavior does—when run through the
probabilistic black box of unforeseen consequences.
In short, obey your conscience, do good and expect unforeseen
miracles; disobey it, do evil and expect more unforeseen catastrophes. Obedience to conscience and its gift of
miracle as a scientifically demonstrable phenomenon. Period, paragraph.
Routine alcohol abuse, however, shattered long-standing social
controls through bouts of unthinkable violence and incivility, sickly hangovers,
degenerative disease and adverse effects on the newborn. Generations of people recovering from benders
or just sickened by daily tippling, would have evolved insane traditions and
institutions to rationalize their drunken misbehavior. Is that us?
The first cities served (have always served) as logistics centers,
disaster refuges and fortresses.
Primitive citadels housed only priestly elites and their bodyguards: a
perfect pick of weapon mentors and battle elites. Later on, inhabitants of walled cities faced
three choices: send a field army out against an oncoming horde, suffer
annihilation at its hands, or submit to it―often all three in
succession. Field armies are just
voracious, migratory cities.
Sedentary agriculture, urbanism and centralized-capital militarism
evolved along parallel but independent tracks.
Urban wealth not only paid for armies, it made them inevitable. Surplus riches demanded military defenses,
property laws and police protection.
Dense urban populations and their fixed assets made fortifications
mandatory and affordable. It didn't
matter whether armed slaves, mercenaries, regulars or ‘free’ militia manned
them. The process of hyper-militarization
became self- sustaining and automatic.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSC) also affects ritual
stupidity. PTSD survivors are afflicted
by permanent hyper-vigilance, attacks of unfocussed panic, paranoia, temper
tantrums, a yearning for mayhem and general inability to readapt to civilian
life. Hundreds of thousands of American
veterans of Vietnam died homeless for decades thereafter (and now, those from
Iraq and Afghanistan): more throwaway dead than the 59,000 and some engraved on
the Black Wall in Washington—the same losses we suffer every year on our
highways, with traumatized survivors in proportion.
Ancient leaders upheld their claim to nobility by seeking the
thickest combat. Nonetheless, they were
supposed to display inhuman wisdom in the course of peacetime
decision-making. This, despite the fact
that they may have been temporarily crazed by PTSD or permanently crazed members of the battle elite.
Another factor favors ritual stupidity. It takes time, lots of it, to collect
intelligence and transmit orders via slow communications channels. Running a country in the days of horse and
sail was like piloting a defective, radio-controlled airplane with a daylong
command/control delay. In other words,
the command you input at moment X would not take effect until X hour plus
24. This built-in time delay would
induce a long series of crashes-on-takeoff, no matter how expert the royal hand
– or the republican hands – on the joystick.
Nowadays, much is written about ‘risk management.’ Management theorists bemoan the fact that
professional risk managers fly by the seat of their pants, especially in
foreign policy circles. They base their
decisions on ‘subjective criteria’ (read bullshit).
Students of risk management should study ‘uncertainty management’
instead. They should review the mental
tricks that risk managers use to shield their conscience. After all, they make vital decisions based on
inadequate data, apply them despite built-in time delays and then consider
ensuing disasters routine and unavoidable.
Weapon technicians are at the forefront of broadband
communications, virtual reality, artificial
intelligence and knowledge systems.
Meanwhile, ‘free market’ parsimony foists obsolete information systems
on civilians―assuming anyone bothers with civilian applications a lot less
well paid though much more profitable in the long run.
Few civilian organizations gather every bit of information in
real-time and study its content in detail.
Such systems are just beginning to surface as military communications,
command, control, computers and intelligence (C5i) systems. Modern C5i hardware and expertise accelerate
the process of analysis, execution, surveillance, repeat ... tremendously. Unfortunately, most civilian institutions
still honor the languid thought processes of ponies and sail ships.
Weapon mentors practice routine protocols of stateliness,
deliberation, and (whenever possible) retrenchment, censorship and reaction in
matters of peace and social welfare. In
matters of war, they practice free-spending creativity, vigor, speed,
unpredictability and open-minded problem solving.
It takes decades to reverse big fat policy blunders (like the
Vietnam War and that in Iraq). After
all, bad programs must be carried out to their bitter conclusion, once top
officials have ‘staked their reputation’ on them. They would rather appear infallible – until
catastrophe pulls down their pants – than admit mistakes, make radical
mid-course corrections and achieve a workable outcome. They will make appeal to every projection of
failure that could result from this change and to every argument that would
tempt them to stagnate in crisis mode.
The vulnerability of entrenched elites peaks when their cleverest
managers realize their evil habits have brought them more trouble than
gain. Then, half-heartedly, they tailor
new policies to a broader cloth.
Reactionaries block this transformation at every step. Having ripped off the most privilege and
profit in times of worsening repression, they are outraged by any change. Their weapon hypnosis dictates that these
things are paramount to them: more so than a clear
conscience.
As social justice wastes away, (im)pertinent proto-elites froth up from the host info
proletariat, eager to challenge ambivalent elites. Reactionaries and radicals often reinforce
each other’s brutality. Battle elites
serve one political extreme or the other or both; weapon managers both foreign
and domestic support their brutality.
Often, partisans of political extremes act in concert and in succession
to disrupt the peace. Autonomous and
antagonistic yet paradoxically complicit, they raise as much hell as they can
get away with.
It takes much more self-control to grit one’s teeth and quietly
bury one’s latest dead, than to dispatch the next helicopter raid or suicide
bomber; firmer authority to forbid the next act of retaliation rather than look
the other way while hotheads take matters into their own hands. Until such time, popular moderates will be
targeted: the bravest ones will be assassinated; the most prudent, terrorized;
and the most covetous, corrupted.
It will be the job of the World Court and World Militia to rescue
brave moderates, protect the prudent and subsidize the covetous everywhere to
promote Peace.
The info proletariat is
always moderate in its politics, at least until threats,
propaganda, selective assassination and aggression distort its outlook. Political violence favors extremists and
frustrates everyone else.
The central question is not how often extremists have indulged in
knee-jerk terrorism; but how rarely majorities have held to their peaceful
ideals and made extremists suffer the consequence of their aggression instead
of rewarding them with worsened violence, for having worsened violence.
The only time I’ve seen a terrorist group suffer from its actions
and stop, at least for a while – as opposed to turning themselves into martyrs
and inspiring the next bunch of murderous whackos
– was during the Munich Olympics. Palestinian
gunmen took Israeli athletes hostage, got them killed in the crossfire and
congealed world opinion against their cause.
What was the difference between that massacre and every one since, on
either side? This I cannot fathom. Perhaps the Palestinians as a community
momentarily horrified themselves?
Majorities must police their own extremists and ally themselves
with non-abusive servants of public order—no matter how bad things turned out
between them in the past. Those servants
must be disciplined in the most draconian manner they will accept, or be
replaced otherwise. The rejects should
be offered the most deadly jobs available.
Demining? This would be necessary
to interrupt the killing.
An excellent analysis of weapon revolutionaries is The Anatomy of
Revolution by Crane Brinton.
Ignoring the peace/weapons antinomy, he reviews other factors very
carefully.
To summarize Anatomy in
Learner terms, the info elite loses its privileged status when its disgruntled
cadres defect to proto-elites in growing numbers. Reinforced by these defectors, the
proto-elite most likely to restore a more lethal army, soaks up many battle
elites. It kills its most effective opponents,
terrorizes the remainder and takes over.
Suffering from siege mentality and paranoia, its bosses brush aside any
thought of peace. Thus will it manage to
sharpen its nation’s threat deterrent.
That is the only outcome of weapon revolutions, wars and
political/technological ‘progress’: more lethal weapon states.
“The [French] Revolution cleared the way for a much larger,
more centralized, state apparatus, able to exploit its revolutionary-patriotic
ideology and new means of coercion to mobilize large armies and the economic
resources for major wars. The Revolution
inevitably upset the balance of the European states system, in which France was
centrally situated; and it created plenty of reasons on both sides for the
series of wars which quickly unfolded.
War, in turn, drastically affected the course of the Revolution, delivering
the ‘coup de grace’ to the liberal phase of 1789-91, and creating both the
bureaucracy of La France Fonctionnaire and the elements of a professional
officer corps and a modern national army.
Not for the last time, therefore, a social revolution was instrumental
in bringing about a major development of the state machine. (Marx, incidentally, recognized this in the
French case, where he erred was in believing that proletarian revolution would
have a different result). Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social
Theory of Total War and Peace, Pluto Publishing Ltd, London, 1988, pp.
47-49.
Orthodox info elites attack each new revolution with just enough
force to set the revolutionaries back on the track of weapon development. Peaceful revolutionaries are unseated through
open warfare, subsidized terrorism and economic blockade. Where outright invasion is inappropriate
because a popular Militia blocks it, internal chaosists (Contras) are unleashed instead.
Freer societies, more evolved in peace, can be goaded back onto
the path of weapon tyranny by means of pinprick acts of terrorism, whether from
external sources or internal ones.
Every world power accelerates this regression to the militarist
mean, and lesser states follow close behind.
Weapon managers pick off peaceable idealists and replace them with pet
weapon mentors; they neutralize political moderates and replace them with
battle elite creeps.
We are programmed to admire this Darwinian selection for
heightened brutality and sociopathy. No
exception is permitted.
Thus, the deadly status quo of contending warfare states grows
more tyrannical every year, despite weapon revolutionaries’ mistaken attempt to
resist and transform it by renewed violence.
This tyranny grows stronger despite and because of them. Every form of violent resistance perpetuates, grooms and strengthens global weapon tyranny.
Non-violent resistance by all the conscience-driven united on a planetary scale – fully confident, transparent, homogeneous in its diversity and steadfast – would dissolve this sociopathocracy once and for all.
“In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the
doubting of a lie is a misdemeanor, the declaration of the truth a crime.” Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood
in War-Time.
“The first casualty of war is truth.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html
We can dismiss commercial advertising and government announcements as stealth lies. They mislead the public as often possible, forever or until someone chokes the truth out of their authors. Repelled by spontaneous honesty, those people fall back on the truth only under intense probing. Even then, they do so reluctantly and on a provisional basis. They would rather bury whopping lies under an avalanche of borderline truths. For them, empty monologue is better than any balanced debate; credible lies are better than transparent truth. The lie is their duty, their rice bowl and their source of ‘honor.’ How deluded can anyone get?
Televised ‘debate’ opposes contestants who accept the kleptocratic status quo with equal fervor, but whose marginal disputes masquerade as debate. This is standard fare in ‘balanced’ American reporting. See for yourself in the Lehrer Report, that corporate darling on American TV.
In the United States, “balanced reporting” means that inexcusable policies deserve more favorable airtime on TV than reasonable ones, and more exculpatory ink in the press. Thus the unacceptable is validated by rote repetition. Obvious sociopaths and convicted conmen get more media adulation than honest folk; reactionaries are paired off against conservatives, Demoblicans versus Republicrats. Their pro forma (for the sake of appearance) arguments simulate controversy while the underlying tyranny remains carefully undisturbed.
Another example. Industrialists confuse comparison-shoppers by issuing household products in off-size, fractional-unit containers: 1.32 lbs., 8.3 liquid pints, 0.7 liters: same product, different companies, different prices. You have one minute to solve. Serving sizes are reduced to play down their mandatory declarations of poison content. Such ‘single serving’ portions would not satisfy the appetite of a child.
No warning labels are required to show that food products have been irradiated, or that they contain genetically engineered ingredients, or that meat was raised in factory farms cramming poisons. Everyone knows such labels would end the sale of those experimental products. They cost much less to produce than those they replace, yet are priced just as high or higher. It will be much harder to clean up after them and much more costly to do so downstream in time, than is indicated by their subsidized prices and censored labeling.
These same manufacturers whine about the expenses they incur reporting their products’ nutritional content: trivial sums compared to the fortunes they spend on false advertising.
Corporations bemoan regulation. Unfortunately for them, regulation is the only mechanism that can restrain their worst schemes. Each new regulation is a token response to inexcusable acts of corporate malfeasance. In the name of ‘healthy’ competition, every corporate board would copy each new fraud if it thought it could get away with it. In the absence of additional regulation, anyone who did not imitate his most crooked competitor would be driven out of business. Massive corporate crime precedes each new regulation and every follow-up corporate protest.
If you catch some previously muted mega-corporation praising itself in new TV ads and on full-page newspaper spreads, chances are, it is trying to drown out some recent outrage it was caught at red-handed.
The ruinous Savings and Loan bailout, the putrefaction of commercial airline service, runaway power bills and recent bookkeeping scandals by enormous corporations, all demonstrate what happens when corporations regulate themselves. Their officers are more than happy to ‘regulate’ themselves all the way to the bank. Profiteering from the Reagan-Clinton-Bush Administrations, the corporate fossil fuel/nuke cartel has replaced government regulation with boundless corporate welfare. So much for the ‘free market’ and its ‘self-regulatory’ burlesque! As expected, Adam Smith’s ‘unseen hand’ is only useful for card sharp tricks.
Let's hope those slimy hypocrites never get their hands on the Social Security fund. They have been drooling over it for years. If so, we’ll all grow old as paupers despite a lifetime’s mandatory savings. As it stands, Congress has dipped its swindlers’ hands in this till during more than one unbalanced fiscal year.
“Stand by for this important political spoof! Instead of forcing you to watch your
retirement funds vaporize in the Stock Exchange, you must report immediately to
the nearest casino and gamble your retirement at house odds. May the free market triumph once and for all!”
Seriously, I’m kidding. If only those house odds could be made reliably profitable for the gambler or at least safe for him, perhaps. What about a casino mulligan, as in golf? You would get to leave with what you walked in with, minus a small entrance fee. Mere life support earnings, most often. After all, these would be government-subsidized casinos on PeaceWorld.
The sudden distress of the American middle class results from decades of 401K captive retirement savings and their compulsory diversion into disastrous stock market investments. Such savings would vanish the moment the stock market collapsed, as it has more and more often and exponentially worse over time.
The term ‘deregulation’ is secret code for “substandard service at maximum prices.” An elaboration of capitalists’ favorite slogan: “Profits for the few, at the risk and expense of the many.” This could be the ultimate definition of national-capitalism, the latest, most perfected form of weapon exploitation.
Commercial advertising clogs already-restricted broadcast channels. White noise static gushes from the mass media. This phenomenon can only be described as a planetary conspiracy to trivialize the important and magnify the trivial.
It just occurred to me that 95% of all broadcast programming (films, TV, radio and the Internet) is solely devoted to wasting the maximum amount of each individual’s spare time while transmitting the absolute minimum of information useful to that individual. Go listen to a few hours of this mass-consumption gobbledygook and evaluate it for yourself. No-one analyzes user needs and targets information to suit temperament and taste. Preliminary attempts to do so have been attacked as invasions of privacy.
We are obsessive-compulsive when it comes to information flow. If it is of any utility to us, in person or through our institutions, we hoard it, ration it and restrict its access at the slightest provocation. We create great trash piles of it – in accordance with our business ‘needs’ – and broadcast that without regard to its usefulness or relevance to the end-receiver. Thus we’re buried under mountains of useless information. This obsessive-compulsive habit demands liberation both personal and communal.
For those of us on the receiving end of this unsolicited babble, it is like being locked in a room with a verbose maniac bereft of taste, culture, honesty and modesty. Our thoughts are drowned in torrents of meaningless babble. Perverse standards of ethics, esthetics, materialism and sexualized violence are pandered to; criminality and its vicious suppression are the norm. Information is jammed down our throats 24/7 about useless products and services.
It’d be rather like using a library, the shelves of which were stuffed with shoddy bookends. If all the monologue machines were shut down simultaneously, this cumulative disinformation would be bad enough. We rapt listeners, however, repeat this nonsense to each other all day long, then go home to absorb another evening’s worth. Thus do we worsen our zombie hypnosis daily and compound our problems.
If a School Board caught one of its teachers foisting this kind of trash on his students, it would fire him on the spot. With perfect justification, you would slam your front door in the face of any salesperson who dared brainwash your children in this manner.
Yet the media mislead us in this way by default. Criminal disinformation disgorges from it unabated. An equivalent output of truth might enlighten us.
Big Lies induce the Routine of Evil, the way sugar induces tooth decay. According to professional liars, the truth is a dough-like raw material to be molded to their employer’s convenience. Anyone ‘stupid’ enough to reject their notion is their favorite candidate for future abuse.
Contemplate an end to such parasitic livelihoods. This Niagara of lies and irrelevancies would roar to a halt. Deafening silence! Yet we would still need products and services. Government would still impose its dismal burden on us. In short, life would go on. But we’d stop absorbing Big Lies so often. Mr. Honesty and Ms. Goddess might turn out to be better friends to us without so many lessons from Big Brother and Bimbo Borax. Who would miss all those wanton lies, once advertising and over-packaging were eliminated?
“Sales of products are less important than we think. Just look at the communist countries: the
millions of pictures of Lenin displayed everywhere you go certainly do not
stimulate love of Lenin. The advertising
agencies of the Communist Party (the so-called agitprop departments)
have long forgotten the practical goal of their activity, (to make the
communist system better liked), and have become an end in themselves: they have
created their own language, their formulas, their aesthetics, (the heads of the
agencies once had absolute power over art in their countries), their idea of
the right life-style, which they cultivate, disseminate, and force upon their
unfortunate peoples.” Milan Kundera, Immortality, Translated by Peter Kussi, Grove
Weidenfeld, New York, 1991, p. 113. By
permission of Grove/Atlantic.
Have you looked at a new automobile lately? We are drummed to death about how sleek, beautiful, elegant and sexy they are. Actually, they are lousy investments: anti-social, ecocidal, elitist, hierarchical, filthy, stinking, unreliable, counter-ergonomic, uncomfortable, dangerous, inefficient, invasive, overpriced, poisonous, poverty-inducing, crime promoting, city destroying and guaranteed obsolescent.
Look down on a highway from an overpass during some clear night. Nature never intended such a blazing cataract of fluid steel to flow beyond the blast zone of a volcano. All our cities have turned into volcanoes. Such a daily waste of precious energy! Venomous reptiles would be more attractive than those automobiles. We have turned them into one-ton key chains, religious idols and class totems. In so doing, we’ve done our best to ignore the obvious.
Of course, without rational public transit our cars offer us the illusion of convenience, which would evaporate if a small fraction of the fortune we devoted to them were spent instead on the ultimate rationalization of public transit.
Take a moment to look around you, the next time you walk around downtown. Note the patina of pollution that flows along the gutter, the inescapable stink and the sepia smear that obscures the horizon. Such real-life excreta never disrupt pristine auto commercials, even though they flood our awareness to such an extent we don't notice them any longer, neither the commercial blather nor the excreta they promote. Note how decades-dry neighborhoods flood as more and more forests are leveled and paved over to satisfy this auto-Mammon. More ‘development’ and cheap logs in exchange for balance-of-trade-collapsing auto and fuel imports. Note how your eyes burn and how smog-laced pollen has turned simple hay fever into chronic asthma in how many, now, four out of ten urban children or more?
Global warming has become a Cosmic Phenomenon, another Act of God, whereas it’s just the output of waste gas leaking from the exhaust pipe of our cars and power plants.
Cast your mind back to the world of medieval burghers. We might be tempted to sneer at their foolishness, with some justification. Among other lethal idiocies, they threw excrement out onto the street for livestock and passersby to wallow in. Future Learners will sneer at us for much the same reason. Just as foolishly, we refuse to keep our soil, water and skies pure; we abuse the poor shamelessly; and we hearken to medieval trivia instead of matters of primary importance. We are truly laughable hicks.
For most people (heck, for almost everyone, ourselves included), truth is a matter of repetition. What we’ve heard most often, no matter how spurious, must be the truth. We can be persuaded that night is day, say, or that private automobiles are beautiful … provided enough people and machines can be made to repeat it to us. Suckered into subsidizing the blitzkrieg industry, we won’t admit this disgrace. Instead, we pay armies of copywriters to broadcast the obvious fallacy that automobiles are sexy. Lumps of plastic and lacquered scrap-metal, cut and wrapped by the ton, farting and drooling poisons: sexy! According to what sexual pervert?
Then, let’s subvert mass transit and make its most promising technologies disappear. Finally, get everyone to repeat: “It would just cost too much to fix, (deep sigh).”
Then there’s this other nonsense. “Government is no good at reducing poverty, improving education, redistributing abundance and delivering justice. We should make government as powerless, slow and stupid as possible.” Regardless of its inevitable growth.
Of course, government cannot provide such services when reactionaries make it their business to sabotage them. However, talented Learners could empower the poor with new policies of some imagination, if only we held the reactionaries off their backs for a while. It is our obvious duty and advantage to do so.
Tell me, who completed the following projects? Emancipation from slavery, ending the Great Depression, the Marshall Plan of economic recovery for Europe (and its Asian equivalents), and manned space travel to the Moon, etc. … Was it central government or a loose gaggle of rich and powerful individuals? Now tell me. Who triggered slavery; the Great Depression; the collapse of Third World economies; the split in the American economic landscape between rich plantations and a Third World nation; corresponding despoilment of the middle class; the implosion of rational space exploration; etc. … was it central government or a loose gaggle of powerful, private interests with their arms deep in the till?
Of course, talented liars and propagandists will fill some valuable niches: those of troubadour, storyteller, actor, magician, seer, priest, shaman and Learner. A Golden Age of storytelling awaits us once all this organized lying evaporates.
Today, we gorge on surrogate violence, reactionary propaganda, redundant sports and soap opera drivel. In the future, growing numbers of Learners will pay more attention to important matters, in deadly and vital earnest. When they take a break from their cherished studies, they will entertain themselves with the most outrageous fabrications that talented liars can spin: the best stories and plays, as well as the best music, smoke, wine, food, companions and children local ecologies may supply. But none of this will reduce the transparency and rockbed truthfulness of Learner government.
I can think of at least nineteen sub-sets of the Big Lie currently mass-produced and mass consumed (it takes two to dance this tango):
1. Dogmatic lies: fictions are asserted to be truths despite their obvious falsehood. Obvious lies are broadcast to a misled public and repeated by it (by commission); or, by universal acclamation, they are passively accepted because the evident truth is disregarded (by omission). See global warming.
2. Simplifying lies: your judgment is too limited to perceive the complex validity of my claim. I lie to simplify my rap. You will yield to my demands without forcing me to go to the trouble of cultivating mutual understanding. (Representative Democracy).
In reverse mode, the complexifying lie: my friends and I can make a relatively straightforward transaction so complicated that only we can decode its tattered logic, fill our wallets and empty yours. (Tax law).
3. Paternal lies: the truth would induce panic among ignorant masses. We lie to protect their childlike innocence. Selflessly, we bear truths they couldn’t handle (sigh). The fundamental question we’re sharing here, is: can professional liars handle the truth better than the rest of us? “Yes” is an obvious fallacy.
This lie extends to the public practice of so-called ‘democracy.’ Majorities abandon painfully honest candidates like Ralph Nader, in favor of “politically correct” carnival barkers and con men (take your pick of the last seven American Presidents, their closest challengers at home and equivalents abroad).
4. Altruistic lies: the truth would hurt you worse than my reassuring falsehoods. Well-meaning adults slather this lie over their children’s awareness. Santa Claus and other child-targeting myths persist despite their double-edged effect on children. “Trust no one and nothing, even under the best circumstances.” Thus are we primed to live in total suspicion and saturated with lies.
5. Post-abuse lies: victims (and especially their descendants) exaggerate or bury their torment, demonize their oppressors and prejudge their oppressors’ descendants. Ex-tormentors justify their abuse, minimize it and try to make the public forget it. Onlookers sugarcoat their moral cowardice by blurring their criminal negligence.
6. Self-serving lies: my interests are damaged by your truth. They take absolute priority over your right to learn, which is insignificant to me.
7. Weapon (and corporate) lies: every public truth is a gift to the enemy. Any information of a quality superior to manipulative propaganda must be restricted. Unclassified information must be incomplete, distorted and/or false. Many trivial truths should be thrown in at random to confuse things. Any admission of error is a boon to the enemy and must be covered up.
Also, military discipline is punishment-based. So weapon technicians lie as often as they can to avoid punishment, maintain best-kept secrets and report they’ve completed impossible assignments. Gobs of punishment are dished out to crush these habits. That just induces additional spirals of military terror at which weapon managers specialize.
8. Natural lies: I am a part your tissue or harmless to you. Do not attack me; feed me instead: cancers, parasites, vampires, infectious agents, embryos in the womb, and bird’s nest mimics. Alternately (and often reinforced by truthful exceptions), I am poisonous or another predator or just a twig. Don’t attack me. Alternately again, I am full of nutritious sap—land here and pollinate me.
Another interesting corporate fallacy asserts that manufactured pollution is ‘natural’ and therefore acceptable because man produced it. Man is part of nature, after all. Was the Plague ‘valid’ because it was natural and because humans transmitted it?
Another sub-heading of the natural lie encompasses our perception of reality. Sensory data flood our awareness in volumes beyond our capacity to process. In compensation, it draws a fine trickle from this torrent and draws a picture of reality from it. Selecting the few stimuli it considers important, it fills the gaps creatively and weaves a stylized, symbolic approximation of reality. Mental sanity is defined by fidelity to gross, material reality this abstraction defines. If every stimulus triggered equal perception, we would be fully aware and just as helpless, like acid-freaks or month-old infants flooded with raw stimuli.
As material beings, we lie to ourselves every time we blink.
9. Revolutionary lies: if we must endure amidst a stupefied populace, trapped in lies and crushed under pernicious tyranny, why not lie like bandits to protect ourselves and reinforce the revolutionary counter-assault? Promoting one evil to combat a greater one: that’s a dangerous vortex to get sucked into and a difficult one to escape. Promoting the truth to harvest a thousand times more benefit – even if with lesser efficiency – would that not be better?
10. Scientific lies: data conflicting with science dogma gets shrugged off as irrelevant, dismissed without inquiry, branded leftover superstition or, worse yet, pseudo-science. As if weapon science were not humanity’s latest collective fantasy … at least until we change the channel during the next set of TV commercials. Too often, this data is written off when individuals with extraordinary gifts achieve unique breakthroughs during momentary environmental optima. If every science doctrinaire’s grad assistant cannot repeat those feats at the drop of a hat, they are solemnly declared non-existent.
Believe it or not, the question ‘why’ is forbidden by current science: another reason why so many Learners turn their back on it. No question should be forbidden to adult Learners, for any reason.
I suppose we should distinguish science mentality from science technology. Science mentality includes the open-minded flexibility, relentless honesty, clinical precision and rigorous methodology scientists love to brag about. Its technology produces the stink, poison, fear, pain, and overwhelming sense of helplessness and dread that we endure; direct outcomes of the rabid competition, closed mindedness, indifference to consequences, and lack of fellow feeling that weapon scientists promote.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in Out of Revolution (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 231), quotes the French philologist Gaston Paris [my translation], who says:
“I profess this doctrine absolutely and without reserve:
that Science has no other object than the truth for its own sake, without any
compunction about practical consequences, good or bad, regrettable or
beneficent. Anyone who permits himself –
through patriotism, religion or even morality – the least dissimulation, the
slightest alteration of the facts he studies or the conclusions he draws, is
not worthy of his place in the Great Laboratory, where the admission ticket of
honesty is more fundamental than that of capability. Thus understood and pursued in the same
spirit in every civilized country, communal studies form a Great State that
spans restrictive, diverse and often hostile nations; a State no war can sully,
no conqueror can menace, where our souls may find the shelter and unity that
the City of God once provided.”
It would be hard to find a more passionate pledge of allegiance to Absolute Science. This fanatical defense of Absolute Truth (or any other Absolute, for that matter) induces more devastating results than any other lie listed here. The Absolute is ideal terrain for brutal simplification; and the most efficient form of simplification seems to be mass murder and political terror.
11. Hermetic lies: in order to promote internal morale and cohesion, we secret fellows should adopt weighty oaths of silence and mutual aid, identifying gestures, elaborate signal codes and clandestine rituals. Hermetic organizations (like the early Christians, Freemasonry and weapon management) lend themselves to accusations of depraved conspiracy, whether true or not. They permit battle elites to indulge in their favorite perversions. Penetrating secret societies with inbred proficiency, info elites persecute hermetics from above, corrupt them from within and slander them from below.
12. Bureaucratic lies: many bureaucrats justify their budget by withholding significant information. The rarer their information content and the more difficult it is to acquire, the more valuable its guardians seem to be and the larger their bureaucracies may grow. Under intense pressure from special interests (both private and corporate), bureaucracies adopt covert agendas that contradict their public mandates. Disguising this contradiction is a critical skill for civilian agencies in a weapon bureaucracy, since otherwise, their overhead would be withheld in favor of more weapons expenditure.
Examples abound. Distorted ‘success statistics’ come to mind from the Prohibition Era, from unemployment counts (always shrunken in official reports), from safety studies of atomic energy, from official reports on the Vietnam War and the ongoing War against Druggies.
In many cases of misinformation politics, bureaucrats start believing their data tabulations are creating reality instead of merely quantifying it. Whatever statistics they crank out, that is reality as far as they’re concerned.
Another common lying technique pegs ‘acceptable’ levels of pollutants, crime and other negative fallouts at current levels, then sets ‘unacceptable’ ones much higher. Base dosages may be extremely toxic, but they’re officially declared tolerable in order to postpone mitigation efforts and reduce corporate overheads. Officially ‘acceptable’ levels may mask real threats until spectacular catastrophes force self-informed victims to raise the alarm, all by themselves and at their own expense. Responsible officials may have been briefed on the problem beforehand, but they block new findings at every turn. They are rarely held accountable for subverting the truth, and often rewarded.
For example, just before the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown of 2011, the official level of tolerable background radiation was arbitrarily doubled.
There is another method of statistical distortion in current use. Many statistics are under-reported or over-reported deliberately, then hugely revised years later. A long series of revisions over time makes the interpretation of those numbers very problematic. Inaccurate predictions based on them reduce the public’s profit and increase the profits of the few with something to hide.
Bureaucrats often trivialize the worst consequences of their policies. This attenuation of unforeseen consequences takes the form of bad counts at the collection level, tampering by partisan intermediaries, and distortions at the top, where unfavorable sub-categories may be entirely eliminated. Favorable statistics are often accumulated using reverse techniques. The greater the pressure for specific results, the more distorted the official tallies. Often, anecdotal evidence collected at the grass roots reveals local conditions more accurately than ‘scientific’ compilations of official statistics.
These numbers must pass through multiple tiers of reviewing authorities, each tier more isolated from the phenomenon being tabulated and more inclined to distort official results to suit its agenda. Finally, crafty statisticians may manipulate these numbers to reach any conclusion desired.
It is easy for weapon societies to sweep unforeseen consequences under the rug, since we are convinced beforehand that such disasters are unavoidable.
13. Lying by deliberate omission: reactionary candidates for public office and high judgeship refuse to specify their position on controversial topics. Their evasion may not bear the stink of direct lies, but their right not to incriminate themselves does not equal that of a criminal suspect. After all, high office and public policy are at risk here, not mere criminal punishment. During a job interview, the least suspicion of unsuitability should be grounds for immediate dismissal; so should any candidate’s tendency to disguise their prejudices.
Of course, complex systems of checks and balances can only control a few deviants who refuse to act in good faith. No system will work when majorities embrace Conspiracies of Greed with gusto. Some overriding moral principle must come into play. Otherwise, we’ll have to await the next spectacle of unforeseen consequences to blow all this manure away. Be warned: once the shit storm hits the fan, it will not be at all pleasant downwind.
People keep forgetting that bad behavior has consequences. Improper behavior should be suppressed for that reason. Idealism holds its ultimate reward, not for its own sake, but because it produces better outcomes through miracles of generosity. I am ashamed to have to remind Learners of this obvious truth: any society that has to defend idealism to itself, against a public opinion majority taught to reject it, has obviously jammed its bearings.
14. Meme-lies: some fanatics find their chosen dogma deeply satisfying. Yet their most cherished beliefs may reflect unique circumstances and aspirations, and may be quite inappropriate for other people. To bolster their fragile egos, personal insecurities, feelings of low self-esteem and powerlessness, other people must accept those fanatical ideas, even if they contradict those peoples’ perceived needs. If enough fanatics share this belief, they may become powerful enough to injure those who threaten them with disagreement. The more deeply held the belief and the more passionate the believers, the greater the likelihood of trouble.
Only practitioners of Satyagraha may overcome this paradox, of which more in its own chapters.
15. Weapon mentality lies: everyone recites the same ‘truths’ even though we all know they are lies. Talented weapon mentors earn big bucks to refine, revise and re-broadcast these untruths ad infinitum. Effective dissent is silenced – whatever the cost – until obvious lies replace the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth… Even if this corruption takes a thousand years and even if it creates another thousand years of social contradiction and deadly turmoil.
16. Sports lies: as long as my buddies and I stick to sports babble, we can ignore gigantic and stubborn social problems.
Injustice prevails when strangers may not discuss serious problems without risking unforeseen violence. So sports babble becomes a magical incantation, the most acceptable means of disarming animosity and sidetracking debate, and the lowest common denominator of mutual irresponsibility. Any adult who dismisses his contribution to critical thought and social activism as unnecessary, is an idiot in the Greek sense of the term: an over-aged child.
Mass media sources sustain this idiocy. They spoon-feed tepid pap to the info proletariat and withhold complex and controversial topics.
One day, I walked into two bars at random and got crushed between two wide-screen TVs and their broadcast sports blare. I was struck by the fact that – in millions of identical places… just about the last public places allowed – absolutely no valid information was being transmitted 24/7/365.
It is time we began reasoning like adults. We could start by forcing the media to retrieve, like good bird dogs, our social truths in all their complexity.
17. Self-lies are the most insidious. They take any form described above but should be listed separately.
You are the only one who can correct such a falsehood, once it has taken hold in your skull. Like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Tale, a self-lie victim must witness the painful after-effects of his delusion in order to detoxify. This process wastes valuable time, demands superhuman courage, drags out the suffering of innocents and induces unbearable guilt in those who repent.
How would our lives differ if we surrounded ourselves with more truth preemptively?
18. The simplifying lies of denial: “Whatever it is, it can never be true or ever succeed. That did not just happen. That is false, no matter how true it sounds. That person cannot be what he claims to be. No matter into what catastrophe we appear to be headed, it will no doubt work out fine in the long run.” Based on the fear of lacking an elegant reply.
19. The lies of art and creativity: Ah! How much sadder life would be without them! Our withdrawal from misery, my friends, not “pursuit of happiness.”
The first symptom of the Routine of Evil is a proliferation of Big Lies. From a Learner perspective, lying is energy consumptive in a world where every joule is precious; it leads to errors of fact, reason and action; it is degrading, insulting and vulgar. Like other forms of insolence, lying takes more effort, in the end, than does adhering frankly to the truth. It is difficult to embrace evil and still adhere to some semblance of the truth without massive self-delusion. So truthfulness might just help us distinguish right from wrong.
Knowledge is wealth. Lying is theft. What would weapon mentality have you do? Do the opposite.
Gandhi’s stipulations were categorical. According to him, Good, Truth and Non-violence are one and the same, each reflects the other. Evil, Violence and Untruth are self-reinforcing aspects of our delusion of ‘separateness from the Universe.’ Lies, cruelty and power-hunger are just different flavors of violence. There is no such thing as a ‘small lie’ or an ‘acceptable level of violence.’ May we embrace his wisdom!
Gandhi believed that people should make impossible demands on themselves in order to learn from their mistakes. According to him, politics offer a supreme challenge to moral beings: the same way tightrope-walking offers more challenge than strolling along a boulevard. Heightened risk makes the business more interesting. Besides, who is supposed to run politics? Crooks?
Gandhi strode the sheer path of total service and tragic optimism, the glorious path of Buddha and Jesus. Only superhuman heroes would dare follow in their footsteps. We vicious cowards must witness their brilliant trajectories from afar, amidst our glowing embers of Hell.
Momentary redemption may come to us by establishing a Learner Commonwealth on PeaceWorld. As far as I am concerned, only reincarnation in Christ’s lifeline could allow us to open the escape hatch to final redemption, for Gandhi’s, Buddha’s and everyone else’s reincarnated soul.
“Most people do not understand the complicated machinery of
the government. They do not realize that
every citizen silently but nonetheless certainly sustains the government of the
day, in ways of which he has no knowledge.
Every citizen therefore renders himself responsible for every act of his
government. And it is quite proper to
support it, so long as the actions of the government are bearable.” Gandhi quote from Raghavan Iyer’s, The
Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York,
1973, p. 321.
We have reviewed the ways governments serve and cripple themselves, established what traits they share in common. We’ve dissected all their ideo-mumbo, religio-jumbo and technobabble. We have magnified government to cosmic proportions and field-stripped it into its component parts. However, if we persist in the old ways, ancient evils threaten to engulf us.
A simple question remains. Can we prevent weapon technologies from committing omnicide and killing everything that lives?
If you deny this likelihood, I beg you, think again. Weapon technologies have evolved to induce a maximum of pain, death and destruction—just the same way rattlesnakes have evolved to strike with their fangs. Years spent imprisoned in a glass tank won’t inhibit a viper from lashing out against a tempting target dangled just beyond the glass. Even if this attack gives the snake nothing but a headache, it will strike anyway, by reflex.
Decades spent recovering from catastrophic total wars won’t prevent weapon technologies from exerting their climax destructive potential, even if this attack gives civilization nothing but its pink slip. Sorry ‘bout that, sweety… Next!
Primitive weapon technologies let loose their climax destruction potential. Up ‘til now, this mass brutality has had little impact on the biosphere, the living membrane wrapped around the Earth; but a massive one on the anthrosphere, the much thinner, more fragile membrane that contains human beings.
Strengthening their stranglehold on the human spirit, weapon managers (insignificant minorities, otherwise) monopolized social expression and snuffed out peace politics. Today, a cultural minority consigned to the margins – even though much more numerous – sings a Capella of peace. Meanwhile, everyone else quietly venerates the majesty of killing or ignores weapon management altogether until it’s too late. Thanks to weapons managers’ information stranglehold, they may wreck the biosphere now and soon wipe out the anthrosphere. Ready… Set… Go!
We have already perfected everything required for mass destruction. There are plenty of trivial but representative examples: quick-firing artillery, tanks, aircraft and automatic weapons. Then there are the significant ones: nukes, chems, bugs and scalar 'controls' of weather, tectonics and electrogravity. We have already perfected omnicide's mandatory rituals: mass conscription, mass consumption, weapon bureaucracy, weapon myths as fresh as they are venerable, etc.
We haven’t quite set off that final avalanche of death yet—that’s all. Otherwise, everything we need has been perfected to the brink of flawless self-destruction.
Even the most devastating weapon states suppressed destructive activities to less than their climax potential. Such halfhearted attempts at unilateral disarmament have been unique in human history. Otherwise, more and more sophisticated weapon mentors justified as much brutality as their rapt listeners could carry out.
During the mid-1800’s, the German army developed the General Staff College, the first Master’s Degree Program in Business Administration. Having lost a hundred times to the French for every time they won; that was their best shot at fixing the deal. It was mimicked soon thereafter by every other premier weapon state. There followed the first General Staff valedictory exercise: World War I, which I call the Great Paroxysm. During this internship project, the front line became a giant, open-air shop floor mass-producing misery, mutilation and death. The opposing General Staffs that managed this disassembly line had more in common with each other than with their own troops. Bound to their entrepreneurial armorers, they formed the first modern multinational corporations.
“The Marquis de Bourcet began the process by creating a
staff college – the first in the world – in Grenoble, and by writing his Principles
of Mountain Warfare in 1764. That
administrative school was far more than the first staff college. It was the first modern administrative school
of any sort. That is to say, the
military began training technocrats almost a century before government
administrators started down the same road and 150 years before the first
business school appeared. As for
Boucet’s Principles of Mountain Warfare, it was to have a great influence on
Bonaparte, inspiring his most brilliant campaign―the Italian.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards:
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New
York, 1992. p. 190. [There follows a very informative history of
the development of the Napoleonic Army almost independently of Napoleon, who
merely overcame its innate conservatism to impose many earlier innovations].
Actually, the first multinational corporations arose to peddle weapon religions. Featherweight fabrications, cheap, easy to manufacture and transport. As long as freedom of worship and thought could be suppressed with impunity, they were ideal merchandise for high volume, high-pressure salesmanship, quick profit, high turnover and long-term monopoly.
Weapon states developed super-virulent biochem toxins during the Greater Paroxysm (WWII) and thereafter. The Allies seeded remote islands with anthrax spores that could still kill sixty years later. Nazi scientists refined lethal gasses and used them to exterminate human prey by the million; the Japanese did so with disease.
As we speak, weapon development goes on without letup, in complete secrecy and criminal silence, with our blessing. Its end products are deadly beyond imagining.
Since human encroachment is destroying more and more biomes, animal diseases must adapt to altered circumstances or perish. Germs comfortably adapted to Disease Levels Three and Four in their usual animal hosts devolve to Levels One and Two in unfamiliar human hosts.
Meanwhile, unforgivable public health failures are releasing a Pandora’s Box of ancient plagues. Slightly better financed health agencies could have held them in check indefinitely or eradicated them altogether. Resurgent cholera, diphtheria, meningitis, tuberculosis, break-bone fever, malaria, polio and hepatitis betray public health ignorance and managerial incompetence on global scales.
No modern combatant used his deadliest weapons, at least against equally armed opponents. It didn’t matter how desperate their outlook became. We've restrained ourselves unilaterally, with no public agreement in place; or so one should hope. Hitler, Stalin and their minions could have farted poison gasses from the rubble of their besieged capitals. Yet all refrained. Japanese artillery could have fired anthrax and botulism shells into the face of oncoming American Marines, but they refrained. Americans could have carpet-bombed Communist countries with disease, and vice-versa against the American landscape. Barring a few loose-cannon exceptions, they refrained.
A score of Prism nation-states contend for regional dominance by threatening their neighbors with massive disruption. North Korea is a typical example of this kind of international hostage crisis. Picture a crazed paranoid bunkered in his house and holding a neighbor hostage at knifepoint. That’s a good illustration of all our nation-states.
The United States would croak outright if one hundred ‘small’ atomic warheads flash-fried a like number of American city centers. The collateral effect of two hundred million starving, RIIDS-afflicted Americans clawing for survival would see to the rest. A hundred nukes? Twenty might do the trick.
RIIDS, by the way, is Radiation-Induced Immune Disease. It would be similar to AIDS but would afflict every surviving radiation victim. Nuclear war officials don’t ever want to hear a public announcement about RIIDS, ever.
Global civilization would seize up if less than two hundred fireballs seared major urban nerve centers across the planet. At least thirty times that many warheads are poised for the Terminal Paroxysm, plus untold tonnages of biotoxins and exquisite chemical poisons. Besides which, scalar weapons of meteorological and tectonic warfare are on the verge of being perfected.
You may have been told there are far fewer warheads in inventory; that they’d been reduced through a series of masterful negotiations… or so you’ve been told. But those counts don’t include ‘tactical’ and smaller warheads held in secret reserve or those, by the thousands, detached from their obsolete missiles but still in inventory.
Do you recall this physics classroom model of gravity? A rubber sheet is stretched out like a trampoline. Heavy objects make little dimples in the sheet, representing planets and stars. The demonstrator rolls a marble across the sheet. This marble is attracted to one of the dimples, circles that heavy object a couple of times and then spirals into contact with it―thus illustrating orbital mechanics?
At this moment, thirty-four wars disgrace us across WeaponWorld (the rubber sheet). Its relatively small surface shrinks with every improvement of our communications networks. Each of those wars is a heavy weight—especially the war between Israel and Palestine: the central sun of our weapon solar system. The marbles are nuclear weapons (properly secured, or passed from hand to terrorist hand). We’re just waiting for one of those marbles to click against one of those heavy objects. Then, boom!
Remember, when (not if) the nuclear curtain does come down, every nuclear reactor, chemical factory, petroleum refinery and bio-toxin lab will blow. Indeed, almost every forest glade, grain field, frame house, household match and baby’s curl in the Northern Hemisphere will burst into flame and toxic smoke. Simultaneously? More probably dragging on for years, as a rationed trickle of nuclear warheads gets doled out from snug, well-hidden command bunkers.
This prolonged desolation will turn into very bad news. Radiation levels will remain lethal for years, especially on the site ex-big cities and downwind of them. They include the best sites for ocean and river ports, mountain plateaus and passes, and healthier elevations in boggy lowlands: geographic features civilization would find irreplaceable. Many surviving crops will remain toxic for decades.
People fantasize all too often about a two-week-long nuclear war. “Two weeks of hell, then the survivors can start rebuilding!” This two-week figure is derived from the Nuclear Rule of Sevens. Radioactive contamination drops by 90% every time another power of seven hours elapses after each fireball.
Twenty minutes after an explosion, let’s say your little corner of the Earth gets hit with a thousand roentgens. That would be a pretty light dose downwind of most bombs; it could easily be ten or twenty times stronger or more. Five hundred roentgens will kill everyone exposed to it in a few hours or days of rot-from-the-inside agony.
You’d better get yourself into in a deep-dug, blast-proof shelter armored with steel, lead plates and foot-thick concrete walls, with carefully filtered air and your own reservoir of clean water. Make sure that you can dig yourself out from under the treacherously heavy surface debris; also, that your shelter is far enough away from this fuel-for-firestorms. Better to die quickly in the primary blast, than to suffocate or cook slowly in your bunker. Such shelters cannot be improvised on short notice, no matter what you've been told.
Explosion plus 7 hours: one hundred roentgens: a very nasty dose, soon lethal for many from lingering cancer. Don’t stir from your deep shelter.
Plus 7 x 7 hours = 49 hours or two days: ten roentgens. Don’t eat or drink anything exposed, don’t breathe the outside air for very long, throw away or bury any clothing you've worn outdoors, plus shower thoroughly in precious, clean water. Never use rain or surface water at this time! Don't bother to boil or filter it; it will be radioactive in any case.
I hope Uncle Sam paid for your bomb shelter with its self-contained water supply and thoroughly filtered air, because no-one other than millionaires could afford it. Did you know the Swiss built blast-proof shelter space for all their citizens, with filtered air, good water and sufficient supplies? At least they used to… The rest of us were too cheap and stupid to see to it.
Plus 7 x 7 x 7 hours = 2 weeks, radiation levels supposedly back to ‘normal.’
Then again, the soil is still ‘hot’ at aboveground nuclear test sites. A half a century later, it gives off twice the 'normal' background radiation count. In turn, that 'normal' count has tripled since World War II (and probably quintupled since 2011 Fukushima). So much for the “rule of sevens!”
And good luck rebuilding civilization!
This, assuming your particular bomb wasn't maliciously clad with “dirty” isotopes that have longer half-lives. If so, multiply the poison time by half (using gold cladding, higher initial radiation with a shorter duration), by twice, by years, perhaps by thousands of years. It depends on the toxic cladding.
In any case, the dirtiest bombs are so-called
Hydrogen bombs (H-bombs), only 10 or 15% of whose energy is released by
thermonuclear fusion and the rest by very radioactive and dirty fission
processes (thanks a lot, Edward Teller).
This according to an article by Howard Morland,
“The Holocaust Bomb: a Question of Time, at
http://www.fas.org/spg/eprint/morland.html. See
also an historic article on the H-
Bomb in Progressive magazine, http://www.progressive.org/images/pdf/1179.pdf. Sorry about the PDF can of worms.
Start the counter closer to 20,000 than 1,000 roentgens, and calculate accordingly (over 100 days instead of a mere 14 spent underground, to get back to almost ‘safe’ exposure levels).
Also, this formula doesn’t take into account second, third, fourth, etc. waves of nuclear attack. The radioactivity from each wave would last as long as the first and add to its malignancy.
Could you hold your breath that long underground? Raise your sheep, rabbits and children underground; your mushrooms, carrots, potatoes and the grain for your daily bread? I doubt it. When you emerge from your shelter, remove eighteen inches of permanently contaminated topsoil (somewhere, somehow) and grow what you can in the clay below that.
Five central command nodes reined in nuclear proliferation during the Cold War: France, the US, the USSR, China and the UK. Despite this strict limitation, nuclear accidents and tripwire confrontations were a lot more scary and numerous than the perfectly blank score currently advertised.
Now that the Soviet Union has spun out of the arms race – at least temporarily – any billionaire with a taste for genocide can acquire his own nuke or the makings thereof. Another dozen countries are lining up to brandish nuclear arsenals, with well-financed terrorist organizations not far behind.
Scalar weapons’ antenna arrays are even easier to build. They can transmit destructive energies from any corner of the Earth, targeting any other spot, unstoppable and hard to trace. At low energy levels, they can broadcast irritating fields over wide areas that make everyone affected unnaturally irritable, stupid and Republican. The Soviet leader Khrushchev threatened to do just that, back in the 1960’s when the USSR began this research. Reactionary tendencies in the American heartland may be attributable to this ongoing irradiation.
Slightly higher energy levels can sicken living things in the targeted zone and eventually kill them. Electromagnetic equipment, no matter how well shielded, can be neutralized, whether point source or across broad areas. Higher energy levels can be focused on high and low atmospheric pressure fronts to induce disastrous weather effects. Greater energy applications could distort seismic fault lines and trigger an earthquake. Apparently, this weapon can be used defensively to create a bubble of total destruction around protected sites, which might even swallow incoming nuclear missiles.
The renowned inventor Tesla initiated these studies. Apparently, he abandoned them after the Tunguska atmospheric explosion in 1908. Draw your own conclusions.
What is most disturbing about scalar transmissions is the fact that they can, by their very nature, multiply input energy instead of diminishing it through the inefficiencies of transmission. Feed the energy of, say, one atomic reactor into this antenna array, and get the effect of thousands at the targeted point or area.
Seismic and meteorological phenomena have this in common: they represent energies equivalent to tens, hundreds and thousands of nuclear weapons exploding simultaneously and in series.
Soon their construction will be thoroughly understood and demonstrated during a few mind-boggling exercises; (three direct-hit hurricanes in a row, anyone?). Soon thereafter, inconsequential terrorist organizations and individuals could take advantage of scalar weapons, much more readily than expensive, cumbersome, dangerous and easily traceable atomic (fission reaction, breaking down heavy isotopes, producing kiloton explosions equal to thousands of tons of TNT) and nuclear weapons (fusion, jamming two simple atoms together to form one bigger one, producing megaton explosions equal to millions of tons of TNT, up to fifty million tons (the “Tsar Bomba” Russian test explosion) – or more?) Their only explosive limit is the weight and volume of the explosive device.
Who could imagine a million tons of dynamite going off in a split second?
This new constant input to the threat formula induces hallucinatory results. Weapons elites would rather hone their precious threat deterrents without interruption. No matter how abject the outcome, they insist that any conflict surpassing a minimalist, AK-47-and-machete stage can be analyzed and checked with the same old military arithmetic. Yet they always wind up juggling imaginary results.
It’s like a tax form’s impenetrable arithmetic: “When you’ve finished with your sums, divide the end-result by the nuclear square root of -1.”
The climax use of weapons has never been a sane proposition; it has become even less so. No longer can major powers go stomping wherever they will, with all the firepower at their disposal. World opinion would never let them achieve ‘decisive’ victory. “You've made a wasteland and called it Peace.” The losing side’s only option would be nuclear counterstrike.
Some may conclude that we haven’t started the next nuclear war yet, despite sixty years of trying. They’re positive we’re not about to start one now or any time soon.
This self-limitation to killing doesn’t take into account new biotechnologies. Using breakthrough skills that will become commonplace in the next few years, lone whackos may cook up incredibly infectious, flesh- eating microbes, in their kitchen sinks so to speak. For example, crazy city-killers could find fully equipped workbenches in Community College laboratories.
The state-of-the-art in biological warfare includes the ability to string together the components of a new organism, more or less like the boxcars of a freight train. One can take the infectiousness of a flu virus, say, and attach the biotoxin producing machinery of Ebola or Yellow Fever; tailor one’s weapon system to any circumstance or level of lethality desired. The only thing that has prevented the release of these experimental models, until now, is that they might mutate beyond the reach of the vaccine designed to protect one’s own people.
This problem would not deter the psychopathic geniuses that WeaponWorld mass produces and leaves adrift to do their worst.
New bio-nano-technologies will compound the problem. They could soon produce lethal, microscopic, self-duplicating biocyborgs deliverable as liquid or powder aerosols. Those weapon technologies would put continent-scale casualties within the reach of any industrious psychopath on Earth. It’s a question of less than a decade before these technologies mature.
This process illustrates Buckminster Fuller’s model of ephemeralization: so-called “progress.” More activity (killing) can be accomplished with fewer and fewer material, time and cost overheads.
“In 1917, … more performance with less weight and volume of
materials, less ergs of energy, and less seconds of time investment per each
accomplished unit of performance, manifested itself for the first time in the
metallurgy, chemistry and electronics of World War I sea and sky
armaments.” Critical Path, St. Martin’s
Press, New York, 1981, pp. 132-33.
The ultimate outcome of this weapon ephemeralization might turn out to be global military paralysis. Following a few military catastrophes in the near future, everyone except crazy people will become too scared to so much as twitch.
This resembles the evolution of threat behaviors among wild carnivore packs. The deadlier the predators’ teeth and claws, the more elaborate, ceremonial and ‘polite’ the pack’s social arrangements had to become, to prevent its self-destruction. Those packs that rejected exquisitely polite behavior, lost the evolutionary game for keeps; their DNA went down the drain. In the same way, international nobility had to invent courtly etiquette and flowery palaver, because any suggestion of personal insult drew hot passion, cold steel and warm blood.
Tedious militarists whine long and loud whenever a check is placed on their killing. They shriek for a return to the good old days of unrestrained gore. During the Korean and Vietnamese Paroxysms, they bewailed orders curtailing proposed aggression against China, Russia and the Warsaw Pact. In vain, they made unending appeals for more offensive activity to ‘eliminate enemy sanctuaries.’ Actually, the ultimate sanctuary of Viet Cong guerrilla was the command bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Troops.
Meanwhile, French Armageddon enthusiasts indulged in the latest weapon ritual: smashing coral reefs as nuclear test sites so that the international brotherhood of weapon scientists could refine its calculations of genocide. They were finding out how to carve the diamond facets of an opponent's military hard points, rather than flatten his cities as area targets. As if anyone among the victims and their allies would restrain themselves in this manner once this mass stupidity began.
Another interesting weapon myth is the allegation of mass betrayal. Cocky militarists often stretch their nationalist ambitions beyond a realistic assessment of their country’s strength and weakness. As a result, they get their nation stomped. This may be the subconscious goal of every weapon manager: to get his unbearably peaceful homies gunned down, once and for all.
Once they manage to get their country crushed, they swan dive for neutral bank accounts and balmy fascist shores. Emerging from their nosedives, a decade or so later, their first words are always the same. “We were betrayed!”
The German Army, bled white and collapsing at the end of World War I, blamed German progressives for surrendering. Hitler’s henchmen accused the long-suffering German people of betraying them in their woeful endgame of the Greater Paroxysm. American hawks left Vietnam a smoking, poisonous ruin, convinced they had defeated the Communists in detail. Faithful National Capitalists, they had robbed honest Vietnamese patriots of their hard-fought patrimony and handed it over to the worst Conspirators of Greed they could find. Then they went home, disgusted with their civilian counterparts who had ‘forced’ them into defeat.
As if any outcome but genocide, disgrace and panicky evacuation were possible under those circumstances. The only other one would have been nuclear war: first across the length and breadth of East Asia, and soon thereafter across the entire world.
No matter what those weapon mentors may have told you, keep one thing in mind. The American phase of the Vietnam War was an exercise in raw genocide – no more, no less – practiced and covered up with Nazi thoroughness. The CIA, the West Point Protective Association, the rich and powerful people who conspired to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and thus override his veto of the war—every one of them has kept busy ever since, covering the gut trails of their innocent victims.
The Chinese government was just as delighted to stage international Wrestle Mania in Vietnam. They knew it was the home of the most unconquerable patriots in Southeast Asia. Those rebels had thumbed their noses at the Chinese for millennia; no matter how many Vietnamese got massacred in the process. What a supreme irony, that America’s arrogant and ignorant militarists could be driven to stub their toes against those intractable rebels.
These mass-murderers permitted My Lai (my lie) and many similar atrocities. They insist that no real American patriot may speak of such things. Those massacres were just the tip of a global gore-Slurpee they’ve mixed up under our noses. The least whiff of its stench has penetrated our nostrils, and we are more than ready to dismiss that stink as some aberration. There it is again; can’t you smell it, wafting from Iraq and Afghanistan, with all its predictable consequences?
These people’s satanic disciples still run the United States and through it, the entire world. Any new atrocity that overtakes this planet will be their handiwork, in pursuit of their dream of a Thousand Year Reich of murder and misery. Their apotheosis and ultimate defensive tactic, of course, will be to reduce civilization back to the Cro-Magnon stage or worse, while they remain bunkered in deep comfort.
Until these facts are inscribed in the official record and until these ghouls are officially called out for their atrocities, none of them may be trusted. Until then, none of their hallowed institutions will do the right thing except by mistake or revolt. We may not feel free to heave a deep sigh of relief until the American government discloses the identities of everyone involved in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Once the survivors express sincere regret for their part in the murder, or once they've all died and been officially condemned, but never before.
The Vietnam War: winnable? Iraq, Afghanistan? My ass.
Modern weapon technologies are scaling themselves down from hordes of expensive bludgeons, to a handful of horrifically expensive, chrome-steel scalpels. A few orbital satellites, small terrorist cells, commando troops and guerrilla bands promise to replace swarms of ships, planes, tanks and ICBMs. All the bludgeon hordes will be carefully conserved, of course, for deployment whenever it’s most convenient.
In the recent past, there were at least seven thousand Abrams main battle tanks parked out in the American desert. Our armored units needed three thousand replacements, at most. The others were waiting to be worn out in Iraq, no doubt… And no doubt are being replaced as we speak, at our expense.
The only thing the American Army has learned in its recent wars, is how to manage a civil insurrection. I use the word “manage” advisedly, as in managing a campfire. How make preparations for one, start it up, fan it hot and keep it going indefinitely.
For reactionary fanatics here in the USA, (and there are millions of them who never learned in person about the Nazis’ failure and disgrace: at least twenty percent of the population) the worst insurgents are moderates in their own ranks and everyone on the other side. That's the insurgency they are preparing to fight. Unlike the American Civil War – prior to which slavers at the helm of American government stacked the deck in their favor through various swindles, but lost because the industrial base still belonged to the North – this time, they will control everything that’s left of the American industrial plant they have been wrecking for decades. Their hope is that this degradation will allow them to prevail over the ruins of America their associates learned to despise since they lost the Civil War. Filthy, unrepentant slave masters…
In theory, at least, modern weapons are ‘surgically’ precise; they promise to decrease collateral damage to the biosphere, as well as cause fewer casualties among unarmed combatants. In practice? The Gulf War’s hundreds of thousands of children murdered by being deprived of simple medicine, clean water and adequate food; devastated economies and sewerfied ecologies across the planet: these illustrate what “minimal collateral damage” entails. The controlled demolition of the Twin Towers, likewise.
Downstream consequences, my young Learners. Pay more attention to unforeseen downstream consequences.
We need no longer limit ourselves to bilateral squabbles. In the future, all sides will suffer similar strategic insults. It will become more and more difficult to pin down exactly who did what to whom. This proliferation of devastation will offer tempting excuses for weapon elites to reduce native living standards and civil rights.
Non-sustainable technologies are not bad per se, but because they cannot be sustained. Inevitably, the price of survival essentials will skyrocket. Each nation’s pampered elite will have to confront its disgruntled info-proletariat, led by avenging proto-elites and armed by calculating foreign powers.
Gleaming in the eyes of orphaned refugees rendered psychotic, drafted on drawing boards for future delivery, or carefully stockpiled and readied for use against us: these weapons of mass destruction have our names stenciled all over them. They need only be broken out in earnest and issued to millions of itchy-fingered troops – or a handful of pistol-waving fanatics – to be rained down on us without letup.
How can we possibly dodge this death sentence?
Beware of weapon mentors,
Wimp or Prism,
Before, during, and long after Learners.
Benjamin Constant:
“Almost all men are haunted by the urge to prove that they are greater
than they are; writers, to prove that they are statesmen. Thus, for centuries, every great initiative
of extra-judicial force and recourse to unlawful measures in risky
circumstances has been related with respect and described with approval. The author, seated coolly behind his desk,
casts opinions in every direction and tries to infuse in his style the alacrity
he stipulates for decision-making; he believes he is momentarily invested with power
as he preaches its abuse; and his speculative life seethes with the
demonstrations of force and power with which he adorns his sentences. Thus does he endow himself with some of the
pleasure of authority.
He proclaims high-sounding expressions of the people’s salvation,
of supreme law and public interest; he waxes ecstatic at his own profundity and
is astounded by his own energy. Poor
fool! He addresses men who seek nothing
more than to listen to him, and who, at the first opportunity, will employ him
to test his theory.
“This vanity, which has warped the judgment of so many
writers, has caused more trouble than one would imagine during our civil
disturbances. All the ordinary souls who
had earned a bit of authority were puffed up by these maxims, which stupidity
eagerly welcomed since they sliced knots it could not untangle. These fools dreamt of nothing but great
measures of public security, of coups d’état.” Taken
from Robert Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, translated by
William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, Carcanet Press
Limited, Harvard, 1994, p. 42.
Raising sheep;
Weaving woolens, satins and tapestries,
Linen from fine-spun flax
Perhaps the first domestic plant
Known to mankind;
Spinning cotton that’s so tough to pick,
As Gandhi taught us to;
Or the silk of infinite toil:
Were those the source of literacy?
Were spirit and wisdom born from poetry
alone?
And prose restricted to accounting and such
trifles,
Because reading was easier to forget
Than the recitation of good poetry,
Nothing more and nothing less?
Censuring sheer lack of wisdom
By simply not memorizing it
And banning its transcription?
Did some epics survive the end of the world,
When all book-learning died?
Was the epic, the Veda, the only thing left alive,
Through the rolling clockwork of the Yuga
Once known time had stopped,
Once all the pages and pixels have vaporized,
(So much arduous work, vaporized!)
With the skill to transmit them?
Water power,
For mills, small boats and fishing.
Was that the source of the numeric?
Or was it in mines,
Or in the ancient chip of flint?
Parallel and perpendicular:
A genial way to teach youngsters geometry?
Survival wisdom
Cast off from nearby massacre,
Out into the hills
Or unto distant shores.
Noble virgins raped,
Cast far from the shielding arms
By the last dying gasps
Of desperate fathers
Lovers, husbands and brothers
All dead in combat.
Out into the wilderness,
Far from warrior-haunted plains,
To distant hills and shores,
Out among dumb shepherds,
And even more reticent fishermen,
Where safety is bought in silence.
To tarry there distant and linger,
Sigh over beauties and laughter long gone,
And count the stitches, carefully,
