SUMMARY
OF Learners INTRO
& VOCAB
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.
No commercial nuclear reactor has ever been decommissioned; we will
revisit its astronomical costs. A
typical weapon system, ruinous from a peace technology point of view, and
infinitely lethal.
“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 backslide 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 every well- 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, all of them add up to 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 resplendent
with meaning—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. Emotion is much more
important to them than reason: up to and including its total disappearance from
public discourse. 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 a successful career 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
poor 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. (Bold 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 some 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 nuclear
hyper-vigilance that has kept the global community on the edge of its 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
am 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.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld