SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
We Learners are just beginning to grasp our basic predicament. The info proletariat is about to realize that it can’t pay so much heed to the meaningless elite monologue; the info elite, to broadcast so much nonsense. Our seemingly most comforting habits have turned out to be futile and, slowly but surely, we are casting them aside.
We should encourage cosmopolitanism, urbanity and mass travel in every population across the planet.
In optimizing the threat formula, our societies have accumulated enough ‘surplus’ wealth to arm several hundred million soldiers with modern weapons and dispatch them for years on end, to smear wasteland wherever info elites choose to focus their fury and wastage—at least at first. Thereafter, that martial desolation will spill over into those places where they are least desired, (read your front yard), spontaneously and inevitably.
Had we invested this dividend wisely in an open and broad peace, we could have expected huge profits in return: more than enough to allow everyone to travel where they wished, to instill deep learning worldwide and disseminate a new world language. All these projects and their peace equivalents would generate a lot more wealth and investment opportunities downstream.
Without the monstrous military overheads we have grown accustomed to, Learner Administrations could provide modest comfort for everyone. I mean everyone, regardless of origin, credentials and return contribution. Any extra wealth they produced would be gravy. I am speaking here of communal riches huge beyond imagining. See Mencius about wealth.
Most Americans would agree that Kansas and Missouri have nothing to gain from interstate war and everything to lose from it. That would be the case for at least seven reasons.
· War shatters bonds of personal affection, trust and trade. The resulting chaos would take centuries to untangle. America has yet to heal many sores that have festered since the Civil War ‘ended’ more than seven generations ago.
· An impartial Federal Government provides each State with peaceful means of conflict resolution. Could any honest Kansan complain, “Those Missourians get preferential treatment in Congress”?
· In both states, big majorities remain loyal to the federal ideal. They identify with a larger whole that seems to foster mutual benefit. They would silence their own prismatic minority—by force if necessary.
· Both states benefit from unlimited access to each other’s workers and resources, without additional tariffs and quotas.
· The federal military draws equally from both of them and from forty-eight other states. It alone boasts a balanced weapons inventory and a full-strength army. If push came to shove, it would outmatch any state’s limited military assets.
· Speaking militarily, the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts, offering greater security from outside threats.
· Both states share the same language, culture and constellation of political metaphors. No significant issues remain to fight over.
For these reasons, State officials needn’t sit up late nights, worrying whether their neighbor’s National Guard will overrun them during the wee hours. American legislators don’t vote bills to fortify their state borders and don’t raise armies to guard them; they don’t worry about cross-state espionage and don’t recruit spies in other states. Any crackpot who suggested such insanity would be laughed out of office.
So why not between all of the world’s nation-states?
Granted, Kansans and Missourians have endured brutal conflict in the past. Euro-Americans and Native American Indians wouldn’t tolerate each other’s socio-economic contradictions. Shortly thereafter, Federal authority lapsed while local battle elites practiced militant banditry to argue the issue of slavery. Once this uncivilized madness ceased, the first fight resumed to its genocidal conclusion.
Nonetheless, any American Hawk could find more reasons for interstate peace than those listed here. If peace is valid between Kansas and Missouri – inviolate yet unenforced – the validity of peace cannot be denied elsewhere. It would be a question of instituting these preconditions far and wide, and permitting no one to contradict them. The United States of the World, above and beyond the United States of America, yet imitating its best features faithfully.
I cannot understand why some (most?) Americans view this model as a threat to their life and liberty. On the contrary, America would become the model for the others to imitate as best they could. It could rule the world, not by brute force but by its shining example. All that is best in America would be empowered thereby and all that was worst, abandoned as disgraceful and no longer necessary.
What harm would there be in that?
No doubt, unresolved water allocations, race/class conflicts and other contentious issues could rekindle militant hatred between these states. Heading off such conflicts and resolving them peacefully, long before they became pretexts for violence, those are crucial government responsibilities.
Another weapon myth demands debridement and what healing that may bring. According to some militant minorities, their feuds have festered for so long, their wrongs have become so unforgivable and their vendettas have run so deep that no lasting peace can be expected.
In the past, Switzerland (and nearly everywhere else) resembled today’s war-torn Balkans, its lovely landscape just as spoiled by factional massacre. Swiss Cantons fought each other for centuries, as Helvetians, Celts, Gallo-Romans, Alemanians, Burgundians, Raetians, Savoyards and Romanche speakers. Its cantons fought each other as allies of puppet master imperialists from France, the Holy Roman Empire and fractured Italy. Bitter Catholic-versus-Protestant sectarian disputes aggravated decades of secular conflict. Both before and after Federation, Swiss Cantons attacked each other over feudal rights, foreign relations, rural versus urban priorities and issues of class conflict. During hundreds of frigid winters, the Swiss burned Swiss villages, raped Swiss women and starved Swiss children in organized mayhem. (Just the way one could depict, in the years to come, all weapon nation-states in history.) Unforgivable crimes and unanswerable acts of revenge stacked up as high as the Alps.
The Swiss tried to hire out their most warlike sons as mercenaries; they lost a million battle casualties abroad, and fought several civil wars, both in person at home and by proxy among clashing armies. Their elite mercenaries were famous for merciless ferocity; they expected no quarter and gave none, unless ordered to by their paymasters.
Today, the serene Swiss (and every other complex mix of ethnic peoples) could make the same outrageous claims. The same claims that Croat, Serb and Bosnian aggressors, Northern Irish, Afghan, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, Middle-Eastern … (this list can grow quite long, quite boringly predictably) spit in each other’s faces without qualms. Each militant feels he owes some countryman a long-standing blood-debt, or lusts after his neighbor’s territory to form a “Greater Ethnic Nation-State” of historical fantasia and suicidal militarism.
Niklaus von Flüe was a lowly monk who clung to a Swiss mountain cave and preached federation and peace until grieving, serious-minded people decided to listen to him. Urged on by him, they concluded they would never settle their disputes by force without enslaving themselves to foreigners who were orchestrating their quarrels. Common sense turned civil war patriots into welcome allies—or shunned desperadoes. Their personal fanaticism and Canton of origin became less important; it mattered more whether they were serious about enforcing the peace honestly and actually walking their talk.
After much trial and error – and lacking any better idea – the Swiss negotiated elaborate pledges of non-aggression. These assurances bound each Canton to its neighbors in peace, allied them against foreign aggression, separated them when they began to wrangle and arbitrated their disputes. Most importantly, they signed ‘sit tight’ agreements wherein allied Swiss Cantons pledged not to get caught up in third-party disputes. No Canton, however powerful and formerly dominant, could confront the remainder by itself and expect to thrive.
By criminalizing internal warfare, Switzerland made itself rich, powerful and dependably neutral. The entire planet could achieve equal blessings if we did the same thing.
A web of peace treaties, cast across the globe, could produce a similar result. Those easy to negotiate (between the United States and Canada, for example); but especially among countries less amenable (for example, the two Koreas), as well as between dissatisfied minorities and their repressive national government. This, assuming every violator faced airtight sanctions and vigorous pursuit for disturbing the peace.
Across the planet, vast new Learning Networks could re-establish trust among suspicious peoples, encourage a relaxed form of Swiss confederacy and criminalize warfare implacably. Given so much more peace and quiet (and far lower military taxes), business opportunities and profits would grow on every scale of endeavor.
We are denied this planetary commonwealth by Prism extortionists and the rest of the population they’ve duped into hypnotized paralysis.
Sovereign states and their harm forces are just well organized street-corner idlers picking their teeth with titanium switchblades. When significant social progress threatens their dominion, they reflexively attack their host population and call this barbarism ‘internal security.’ With international connivance, a global conspiracy of prismatic aggressors resorts to identical assaults – despite their geographic and political diversity – quite predictably.
We might conclude that warfare is a public health problem, a global pandemic. In that case, specialized peacekeeping/peacemaking forces should quarantine and eradicate it, backed by the industrial might of the planet. Millions of civilian volunteers could rebuild what has already been destroyed and work diligently to satisfy every demand that drove locals to fight.
Such organizations as Ruppert Nuedeck’s German group, Cap Anamu; the Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) of French origin, Belgian administration and global commitment; the American organization Witness for Peace—are prototype organizations of Learner intervention.
There are millions of potential volunteers out there, all dressed up with nowhere to go. We have merely to inspire, organize and deploy this PeaceWorld Army Group.
Metropolitan administrations cannot resolve their crime problem by laying waste entire wards. Weapon managers have rehearsed this alternative in Napoleon III’s Paris, in 1985 Philadelphia, on the Right Wingers’ West Bank and anywhere else reactionaries thought they could get away with it. They can't sell arms to one-half of the perpetrators, either, even though some reactionaries consider this a sound bargain and sound politics.
On a planetary scale, we should imitate the healthiest cities. Within reason, we should deter manifestations of organized violence and deliver all the peace services required―nothing more and nothing less.
Malcolm X initiated an internal jihad against his own rage and in favor of brotherly affection, following his hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). During his trip, he discovered that white Muslims could be just as friendly to him, as white Christian bigots had been hostile in the United States. This observation made him change his mind about the necessity of waging total war against the world of whites. He set his mind to promoting peace, when war had been his prior goal. His martyrdom for peace is a valuable lesson in the benefits of mass travel.
Like Ho Chi Minh who, despite his unrelenting struggle against French colonial tyranny and bully American militarism that he held in white-hot contempt (with good reason), never let go of his deep affection for the American and French people and their striking ideals, that he had picked up during his comings and goings thereto.
Lots of ignorant bigots could discover that the nations and races they had simplified and despised as a group, are much more complicated than they think and made up of individuals pretty much like themselves, more fit to be admired or simply tolerated.
They could thus avoid the bigot’s dilemma: anyone is bound to be wrong who generalizes about humanity, in whole or in part, except for the need to love it in whole and in part.
In order to achieve this attitude transformation, we need to develop a cheap, reliable network of global travel. Military transport assets and barracks could be demilitarized, refurbished and interlocked for everyone’s use on a subsidized basis. Massive student exchange programs could swap the children of recent military antagonists on a temporary basis and intermix them with those who stayed home this year.
This new melting pot must be watched very carefully. Learners must not flood closed societies with unwelcome and potentially disruptive intruders, and thus stir up local xenophobia. Nor should we place young innocents at the mercy of local chauvinists who might retain some grudge at their expense. It will be up to idealistic parents to determine if they can risk the safety of their precious children to support this Learner ideal. Local authorities would assure that those who deal with the newcomers (teachers, guides chaperones and such) are fully qualified to do so – perhaps because of their own inter-antagonist cultural education and field trip among the enemy.
In addition and beforehand, wealth, health and learning should be more or less equalized across the planet. Otherwise, planet-hopping criminals, economic refugees and bearers of exotic diseases might flood more affluent lands and deter their influential inhabitants from pursuing this project.
Dedicated sacrificial interventionists may help thwart massacres at future Beiruts, Sarajevos and Kigalis. Quite often, carefully advertised peace martyrs have rocked well-established and brutal weapons elites back on their heels. Examples include the Kalinga casualties of Ashoka’s shame, the wave of saintly martyrs that preceded the bureaucracies of mass religion (Catholic, Islamic and Buddhist, for example); the massacre of Gandhians at Amritsar; the non-violent Indian salt marchers at Dharesana near Surat; American Freedom Riders during the 1960’s; Kent State war protesters whom green troops volleyed in panic; Steve Biko and his brutalized companions in South Africa; the Argentine ‘disappeared’ and their courageous mothers; Mr. Aquino of the Philippines, assassinated on his return from exile; Witness for Peace Ben Linder, gunned down in 1987 Nicaragua; and religious workers brutally attacked in El Salvador. Countless other martyrs for peace have left us their memory from Guatemala, Mexico and other settings. Thanks to the connivance of the U.S. Congress and other orthodox power brokers, their sacrifice has often gone shamefully undocumented.
During future complex disasters, a few carefully publicized, canary-in-the-coal-mine peace martyrs may avert local genocide. They could convert world outrage over their witness, testimony and sacrifice, into immediate, concrete intervention. They might dedicate their organization to the sacred memory of Rachel Corrie. Carefully trained peace martyrs would confront weapon sectarians under the klieg lights of world publicity. In this manner, many human rights abuses might be corrected informally on their home ground. This might reduce the need for foreign military intervention: more clumsy, slow, expensive and unreliable in the long run.
Most families do their best to conceal internal squabbles from strangers. Learners might force Prism sectarians to do likewise internationally. Meanwhile, the World Court could marginalize militant prismatics and reenergize political moderates across the globe. It would defer military intervention until every peace initiative had been tried and exhausted, and until a jury of randomly selected peers had so ruled in an adversarial court of law.
Learners may replace the UN’s ad-hoc and penniless crisis fumblings with well-rehearsed, fully funded and much more vigorous contingency plans. These complementary instruments should be tested: A) Peace Olympics, B) the World Court Foreign Legion, and C) new planetary religions broadcasting the basic tenets of Peace Jihad: non-violent and sacrificial martyrdom whose only objective is Peace.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld