SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
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 globe.
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/Obamoid policies have merely refined mass paranoia and further 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, abundant 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 the enemy has 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 Qunietra, 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 were been 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 their grandpas and child soldiers have 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 their domestic weapons industries during peacetime. Thereafter, 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 or 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 would 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 through 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 into nocturnal blast furnaces like reluctant crickets lost in a cloud of loyal moths. Fat 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 that our collective memory retains. We require that perpetual 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 our universal wisdom; its antithesis, as unacceptable as cannibalism.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld
to PeaceWorld