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TechnoratiBowing Down to Our Own Violence
Several days after the mass killings at Virginia Tech, grisly stories about the tragedy still dominate front pages and cable television. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale -- the war in Iraq -- ebbs and flows. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the chronic evasions of the American media establishment.
In the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of official American violence overseas is a routine assumption.
"The first task of the occupation remains the first task of
government: to establish a monopoly on violence," George Will wrote three years ago in the Washington Post. But now, his latest Newsweek column laments: "Vietnam produced an antiwar movement in America; Iraq has produced an antiwar America."
Current polls and public discourse -- in spite of media inclinations to tamp down authentic anger at the war -- do reflect an "antiwar America" of sorts. So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that's reserved for American warriors in American society.
When a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent.
However -- even after four years of a U.S. war in Iraq that has been increasingly deplored by the American public -- the standard violence directed from the Pentagon does not undergo much critical scrutiny from American journalists. The president's war policies may come under withering media fire, but the daily activities of the U.S. armed forces are subjected to scant moral condemnation. Yet, under orders from the top, they routinely continue to inflict -- or serve as a catalyst for -- violence far more extensive than the shooting sprees that turned a placid Virginia campus into a slaughterhouse.
News outlets in the United States combine the totally proper condemnation of killing at home with a notably different affect toward the methodical killing abroad that is funded by the U.S. Treasury. We often read, see and hear explicit media commendations that praise as heroic the Americans in uniform who are trying to kill, and to avoid being killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In recent decades, the trends of war have been clear. A majority of the dead -- estimated at 75 to 90 percent -- are civilians. They are no less innocent than the more than 30 people who suddenly died from gunshots at Virginia Tech.
It would be inaccurate to say that the bulk of U.S. media's coverage accepts war launched from Washington. The media system of the USA does much more than accept -- it embraces the high-tech violence under the Pentagon's aegis. Key reasons are cultural, economic and political.
We grew up with -- and continue to see -- countless movies and TV programs showing how certain people with a handgun, a machine gun or missiles are able to set wrongs right with sufficiently deft and destructive violence.
The annual reports of large, medium and small companies boast that the U.S. Defense Department is a lucrative customer with more and more to spend on their wares for war.
And the scope of political discourse, reinforced by major news outlets, ordinarily remains narrow enough to dodge the huge differences between "defense spending" and "military spending." More broadly, the big media rarely explore the terrain of basic moral challenges to the warfare state.
Everyone who isn't deranged can agree that what happened on April 16, 2007, at the campus of Virginia Tech was an abomination. It came about because of an individual's madness. We must reject it without the slightest equivocation. And we do.
But the media baseline is to glorify the U.S. military -- yesterday, today and tomorrow -- bringing so much bloodshed to Iraq. The social dynamics in our own midst, fueling the war effort, are spared tough scrutiny. We're constantly encouraged to go along, avidly or passively.
Yet George Will has it wrong. The first task of government should not be "to establish a monopoly on violence." Government should work to prevent violence -- including its own.
Norman Solomon's book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" is out in paperback. The world premiere of the "War Made Easy" documentary film will happen in New York City on May 14. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com
30 Comments so far
Show AllThe second amendment as written:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
This written when the country was founded and did yet have in place a permanent standing military or any kind of law enforcement by which to guarantee the security of its people. It's time the second amendment was revisited and repealed. There is no need for Americans to own firearms, its not like we need to go out and hunt to put food on our tables either. How disingenuous for the NRA to keep insisting that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" when we all know that it's people with guns that kill people.
If people so mentally unstable as Mr. Cho can easily purchase the guns with which he killed 32 people just proves the laws currently in place no longer protect society and as such need to be addressed. Its time we send a message to anti-gun control groups that the right of the people not to be murdered far outweighs their right to own a gun.
"Some people say I swagger...in Texas we call it walking." - G. W. Bush presidential debates.
"Some people say I strut my stuff...in New York we call it walking." H. R. Clinton in future presidential debate.
Sadistic arrogance by any other name has it's repercussions. The suicidally insane spewing of activated depleted uranium by one callous character shell as opposed to another should be avoided for the betterment of humanity.
This very tricky challenge of confronting the sadistic character appears to us on both national and local forms. And these forms can be begiling.
The Bush quote above is a classic example of using humor to flip flop a weakness into a strength. As a human developmental structure specialist I can see that the Bush "swagger" is a form of compensatory walking that has been apprenticed since the very beginning of crawling.
To compensate for the physical difficulty Bush has also apprenticed his humor from that early developmental period. Arguable his greatest talent.
John W. Dean in Conservatives Without Conscience depicts how the form often appears as a Warm Grandparent figure. How many times have we seen Saddam patting a young boys head?
How many people in society are sadistic characters (remembering we all have the potential)? My guess is 1 in 5 with the point being this character rubs elbows with us everyday at home, work, and play. Thus the local is as much the sparring ground as the national.
And as Marshall Rosenberg points out in his work for Non-violent Communication and a Language of Life, as well as have others; Frederick Douglas comes to mind, it is up to the "docile", in this language the masochist, to make the change in behavior.
Thus, because the sadistic issue is local it is available for anyone to do their part in "saving" the evil empire from itself. The foe is very talented and shifty, but the masochist too has developed special talents including perception and insight, the timing of which can be used to their advantage.
I am amazed at the interest generated by this article. It gives me hope. Solomon's books are now on my reading list, and I have a sense they will rank along with some recent favorites by Jared Diamond, the books of Daniel Quinn, Barbara Kingsolver,and Ray Bradbury.
For years I taught Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and I've come to know the novel intimately. I remember so well the discussion between two main characters, Montag ("hero"), and Capt. Beatty ("bad" guy). Beatty justified the existing dystopia by explaining to Montag how the people basically got what they wanted. And what they wanted was instant gratification, freedom from pain and suffering, and mindless entertainment. A prophetic book written in the early 1950s!
I think we have have created our present system through our laziness, our narcissism, and our greed. This country needs a major restructuring, a new mission statement, and a populace that will exercise its collective voice. When will this happen? Soon, I hope, but I fear it will take a major catastrophe to jolt us into awareness, and then to action. And I probably won't be around to see it.
O2Bfree: I never said there actually was abuse of returning vets, but the orchestrated glorification of "warriors" the that we see today was lacking. There is a very well-constructed effort to exploit collective guilt, real or cultivated, over the treatment of Viet Nam veterans in order to manipulate the debate over Iraq.
Antiwar activists comprised a small percentage of people who opposed the war. Many people opposed it but never marched in the streets.
My own belief was that many young activists were motivated by the lessons of WWII. You know, that war had only ended 20 years before the social activism of the 1960s. Moreover, existentialist thought, with its a strong introspective turn with respect to personal choice and commitment was also a strong influence among young people. There was a real sense of not wanting to be part of an "evil empire" as well as a recognition that it is up to individuals to refuse to do evil at the behest of state authority. I don't think these aspects of the activism of that period gets much air time, but I remember it very well. The images and lessons drawn from the Nazis and the society that enabled them were very vivid among young people.
People who participated in the Viet Nam war were seen as individuals who chose to be engines of imperialism. "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" was one slogan that captured that sense of individual responsibility to resist the dictates of an unjust and imperialist society.
Paul Bramscher has got it too. It's Freudian. The issues of powerlessness and sado-masochism come perfectly together in our psycho-sexual new world. Maybe it's time to re-read the Austrian doctor, though we should be warned that there are some nasty bugs under that rock.
The question keeps coming up, over and over again. What's the matter with us? Why are we so violent as a society? Why are we so nuts?
Awaken has got the key idea, I think. Power and powerlessness, a dread of impotence. We might draw a rhetoical connection between Iraq and Virginia Tech with this in mind.
Since Vietnam the third world has evolved effective techniques for neutralizing the irresistable firepower of modern invading armies. These include suicide (the ultimate refusal to be intimidated by fear), guerrilla warfare (the ultimate psy-ops - don't confront their army, let them in and day after day clandestinely blow them up in their humvees) and non-spatial (viral) structuring (al-Quaeda's brilliant evolution from the Algerian insurgency of the '50s - decentralized command and control, presenting us with an enemy with no physical, "bombable" location.) When we realized that the World Trade Center was brought down by this ghost enemy, we just went bonkers. The enemy we thought we could control had discovered the secret of invisibility. It was a crisis of power and powerlessness. So we went after Afghanistan (which at least we could locate on a map) and Saddam Hussein (an antiquated cartoon dictator who, though he was not al-Quaeda, could at least be located and destroyed. Iraq is our psychotic rampage, our terror of powerlessness. The Iraqis are not responsible for our anxiety, any more than those 31 people at VaTech were responsible for Mr. Cho's pain. But sometimes you just gotta go after something, somebody, you know?
We are fighting terrorism overseas and terrorism is happening right in our back yards.
Beware-as the disinfrancised rise up and destroy because they have nothing to loose.
Murder is increasing in every ghetto in America. Young people glorize Columbine and lots have the fantasy of blowing up there schools. Some will do anything for a day off of school even to the point of calling in false threats. Kids put up awful websites turning authority figures into criminals and perverts.
We have lost respect for each other. People tear down others to feel good about themselves. Have and have nots.
Our governments turned society into a doggie dog world where people can do what they will(kill and steal) to obtain material goods.
Job outsourcing and downsizing was created to eliminate the working class who "deserve it because they did not educate themselves."
Hindus have their untouchables, mudscums have their anti-woman-woman wanted rape, Christianity has their work hard ethic that leads to a dead end and selective morality.
We need to be a kind society where people are trained for new job opportunities and even given jobs.
We need to help people who cannot mingle in society and need emotional developement.
Our society breeds corruption and psychopathic behavior. After all nothing matters but money and it does not even matter how it is obtained.
No one is safe.
jp and Ipenek invoke the image of the spat-upon and abused Vietnam Vet. This is largely a myth created by Nixon/Agnew and propagated by MSM to discredit the peace movement, a Big Lie repeated often enough to become true. Although there may have been a few isolated incidents, there was nothing like a movement of protesters attacking Vets, and in fact vets were a large contigent of the antiwar movement, vis Vietnam Vets Against the War, John Kerry. There was plenty of prowar violence against antiwar protesters. And then as now, isn't the real abuse of the vets perpetrated by the government itself?
Nietzsche!
"So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that's reserved for American warriors in American society."
Another big factor is the state of chronic fear (i.e. excessive anxiety) the population is functioning with. Being mortagaged to the hilt even supposedly rich people are living with the fear of surviving paycheck to paycheck.
The loss of paycheck is a carpet the Spokesmodel continually pulls out from under the people. Along with this is the "enemy imagery" that is still a large part of the collective tribal psyche. The Spokesmodal(s) did an especially good job of emblazening the enemy image by chanting the mantras of "evil" and "inherently evil" for around 2 years (evil still crops up, but inherently evil seems to be put to pasture).
Interia is another big factor.
"It came about because of an individual's madness. We must reject it without the slightest equivocation. And we do."
"...no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent."
"There is no way to peace–Peace is the way."
Neiczche is correct here and the previous 2 quotes are fallacious.
Once one finds the path of peace they see that the horrible actions are not "absolutely wrong" and deserve "condemnation", they on the peace path know that the action, regardless of how horrific and desirous of avoidance, is not the act of an "individual madman" - recall all those who participated in gunman Cho's life, either as an instrument of fear or intrigue.
Those on the peace path embrace the whole situation. If one condemns as absolutely wrong the actions of someone like Cho, they should realize that in condemning they condemn the bone, muscle, sinews, and nerves that perpetrated the atrocity, that are the same bone, muscle, sinews, and nerves,and energy flow forms, that are used and needed to reconcile the situation and form different behavior patterns.
In a flat out condemnation of Cho, and even George Bush and Richard Cheney for that matter, one condemns the feelings that people have around these perpetrators and thus inhibit, through fear of ostrisization, the sharing of those feelings of inadequancy or others of discomfort and discontent - that for world peace - needs to be part of daily discourse.
We on the peace path call for the impeachment of Bush/Cheney not out of vengeance, but, with some fear factor, but more as a means to stimulate the needed discourse for bringing about the glory of human world peace.
Paul: Just as the fabricated "need" to fight terrorism legitimizes beefing up the military (to some, primarily rightwing Republicans); a society that festers on violence and the contemptuous behaviors it breeds NEEDS policing forces of all sorts to maintain some form of order amid the burgeoning chaos. It's a more complex form of cowboys needing Indians. I agree that something is VERY wrong, but if the corporations that do best in this climate, including pharmaceucticals NEED things wrong to fix, you can see where the motivation is to maintain such an off-balanced cultural (not to mention political, social, economic and ecological) climate. When we think of the sickness in those with obsessive need for wealth "enhancement," the only ground to meet them on is that of their children and grandchildren's potential future(s). The paradigm that's ravaging our earth and raping resources like a rabid animal, is obviously not one that CAN last. How much our society adapts and changes to meet environmental necessities, how much we reel when the government over-runs its purchase power (on borrowed funds), how much we learn from this "made for TV spectacle" of empire and oil, all that is yet to be written. The more people who wake up and show empathy, decency, justice and live a conservation-based ethos, the better for all of us.
Arguably, it's much worse than glorification of violence. There's a masochistic and brutal streak running through American culture, in its movies, videogames, Abu Ghraibs, secret prisons, and neglect for the habeas corpus. Look at the violence in movies, say, from 1960 and earlier. Compare it with modern movies -- it's not just the level of violence, but also the amount of sadism and brutality that's been injected into it.
So it's not just a simple matter of the government & moviemakers glorifying violence to get more recruits, or make more money. There's something wrong about our culture in that this crap is appealing in the first place. Feelings of helplessness, inability to identify the real opponents, etc. probably give rise to an audience which latches on to such myths with vigor. Indeed, it's likely that the more volatile, unsustainable, corrupt a society's foundations become, the more "important" that it is to keep the society glued together by various mythologies. The lure of sadistic brutality being one of them. We know what happens when individuals snap -- what happens when societies as a whole begin to snap?
We become what we expose ourselves to on a daily basis. I watch as many young people spend hours viewing creative and novel videos and books about violence and how effective it supposedly is in vanquishing bad people. These young people are often victims of a system that dulls their minds and narrows their options in life. Low-payed corporate slave laborers and students with no real hope for a better life become addicted to fantasies about power they do not have and are not offered in their own lives. Violence is an addiction born of despair, whether in the bombers of Iraq or in our own children confined by the plastic, soulless non-society we have created. Peace cannot be a reality until people start realizing they are not really separate little beings competing with each other but really all the same being reflected and expressed as individuals. Common dreams for a community.
Beware of the memories we are creating in Iraq, we can't just have a parade when our soldiers come home... we leave a legacy of dead family members and friends, of grief which will one day erupt even when peace has come. We see our dead as so different from their dead, and I am reminded of a remark by a politician in Israel, there are no innocent Palestinians... because they live there! I think this applies to the Iraqi civilian population too, they are guilty because they are Iraqi's. Beware of their memories...
Dear friends, in Chile is not usual to see on any screen - movies or TV - our own armed forces, military or police, doing heroic and violent (but always righteous) deeds, but we see, all the time, USA's forces doing that.
From time to time concern surfaces in our society, about too much violence as a show; here battles are for the classroom, not for entertainment.
Nevertheless we at least have some "brechtian distance" in our favor; it's not our flag the one we see triumphing over indians, mexicans, arabs, vietnamese, spaniards, etc. And sometimes the defeated look too much like ourselves :-)
But in USAland people has no defence against such mind conditioning. Man, growing there must be queer! You can't help to be emotionally involved, it must be hard to disengage oneself from that pervasive indoctrination; I congratulate all USAlanders capable of seeing through the courtain.
From the green shores of Patagonia, un abrazo.
In 1978, Jerry Mander wrote, "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television." He warned of the unstudied brainwashing effects television. Anything anyone does six to eight hours a day, everyday, will effect that person. It's not the news that's the problem - most only see an hour or so per day, of which a small percentage is graphic violence. No, it's the years and years of death and dismemberment and gore Americans CHOOSE to watch, day in, day out, from the age of... 5?
Of course, corporate "TV" denies any connection between saturating a brain with the worst violence imaginable and possible behavioral consequences. The usual: you gonna believe us or your lying common sense? But that is the definition of brainwashing: replacing what's there with what you want there. Replacing "normalcy" with tens of thousands of hours of violence.
"There is no way to peace--Peace is the way."
If you want to lay down your life for others just refuse to participate in violence. Violence is contagious. It infects member after member in the community until everyone participates. It takes on a life of it's own, refusing to tolerate the existence of any member who will not join in (Jesus, Gandhi, King).
Nonviolence is a threat which the system cannot withstand and will not tolerate. Violence is preferable to passivity since passively going along with an oppressive system helps perpetuate it, but Active nonviolence has a history of never having been defeated--on those rare occasions when someone is strong enough to follow through with it. Mark Kurlansky's book NONVIOLENCE--twenty five lessons from the history of a dangerous idea is instructive.
Practitioners of nonviolence, if they attract attention, always wind up dead. The same system that kills them afterward makes them saints. Rebels are a threat to the system but saints have many uses--not the least of which is being used to promote a war after some time has passed--the example of Jesus comes to mind.
My belief is that what happened during Vietnam, with public opinion turning violently against the troops, was not an aberation, and we will see it again in the near future if we do not get out of Iraq. When the public finally concludes that what is being done in their name is abominable, even if performed by the well-intentioned, the direct perpetrators will be held accountable. People who say "never again" to how returning troops were treated in the 60s-70s are in for a rude surprise; it's going to happen again, without a doubt.
Horror literature as college curriculum:
"Ross Alameddine sat a few feet from Mr. Cho for months in a class examining contemporary horror films and literature. Both students were required to keep what were known as "fear journals," where they chronicled both their reaction to the material covered in class and their own fears.
Mr. Alameddine, according to classmates, made an effort to speak to Mr. Cho on several occasions, trying to draw him out of his closed world and his refusal to interact with other students.
On Monday, Mr. Cho shot and killed Mr. Alameddine.There is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Cho targeted his classmate, but it is the first time one of the victims has been connected to Mr. Cho before the shootings.
The class they took together was new, offered for the first time last fall. The students studied movies like "Friday the 13th" and read Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft and Patricia Cornwell novels. "We had a whole discussion on serial killers," said one student, who asked that she not be named because she wanted to avoid a crush of attention from the news media.
Mr. Cho never spoke during the discussion, she said, but he took notes.
The student and Mr. Cho were in another class as well, a small class on playwriting, during which she grew fascinated by him.
"In all honesty, I took a huge interest in him last semester," she said. "I never heard him speak a word, and I was so curious about him. I actually tried to follow him after class one day, but he got on a bike and I couldn't keep up. He had a red bicycle."
In interviews with six members of the English faculty who had Mr. Cho in a class or had been in close contact with him, they described how as early as September 2005 and as recently as September 2006, they found themselves struggling to define the line between a legitimate work of self-expression and one of violent or sick imagery that needed to be restrained." --NY Times April 19, 2007
"Government should work to prevent violence - including its own"
The US is unarguably the most violent society on earth. We might do the most good (or at least we used to), but we also do the most damage.
The Iraq war and the murderous rampage by a deranged kid is a direct product of American society. If you don't believe Mr. Cho learned how to solve problems by looking at how our Presidents solves problems, than I got a bridge to sell you for real cheap! No wonder the warrior movie "300" still broke records at the box office with bad reviews across the board.
Theres something fundamentally wrong with our indifference to the US invasion and occupation causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands (600,000?!) of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Adding "Conflict Resolution" to the cirriculum, along with Gym, Math and Science, is long overdue.
Wow, fascinating to come across such a well-reasoned discussion. :)
To me, any society needs its defenders. Against both internal and external threats. But those defenders need to understand their role, accept the limits of that role, and when they do that and perform in that way they should be amongst the most highly honored people in a society because of the sacrifices they make for the society.
To me, in a society you want a peaceful core. A place where families can be raised, where people can conduct business, live their lives, grow, learn and progress. You want this to be a peaceful place, as all of these activities happen in peace and are destroyed in war and conflict. So any society wants a peaceful and calm core where this can take place.
The problem is, if this is all that is created you will find that there are those who want to destroy in with violence. These people can be both internal and external to the society. They can be people who are not willing to do the work to succeed within the peaceful core, so they turn to crime and violence to get what they want. Or they can be external enemies that see the peaceful society as easy pickings that they can go steal by a violent attack.
Thus, any society needs its defenders. It needs internal defenders to stop the internal criminals. It needs external defenders to deter and defend against external enemies that might attack to come loot and pillage the peaceful society.
But, the key bit we seem to have lost in America these days is that both of these groups of defenders must accept that they are not the core of the society themselves. They must accept that by choosing to be a defender, they have actually separated themselves from the true core of the society. The society exists to create the peaceful and prosperous place at its core. The police that defend it are neccessary .... but such a society does not want a police state where the police are all-powerful and the driving force of the society. And such a society does not want to be a warrior state where the goal of the society is war against its neighbors.
In the case of both the police and the military, the defenders the society requires have deliberately taken up professions that are counter to the main goal of the society. And both the society and the defendes must realize this. The defenders must accept the limits that must be placed on them. And the society must honor and support those defenders that are neccessary for defending the very existence of the society.
Of course, America is a long way from that today. But maybe not so far as you might think. Most Americans support the goals of the peaceful society at the core. Most Americans support the creation of a peaceful and safe place to raise a family, conduct business, and to learn and grow. What is wrong is that the defenders of the society don't accept that there are limits on themselves. The police dont' accept that they don't have carte blanche to do whatever they want. And the military seems to think that the whole goal of the society is to support their attacks on other societies. The military doesn't accept that they should be much more passive defenders of what we've got.
And all of the police state mentality and the sparta warrior society mentality is supported by a media system that seems to be driven to support these goals ... and at best give only lipservice to the creation of the peaceful and safe home that Americans truly want.
"Support for the troops, in my mind, includes according them the dignity of proper use - defense of the homeland from viable threats. The subversion of such honorable purposes to a debased agenda makes our sons and daughters into mercenaries and goons, and has the effect of filling their ranks less with real patriots and more with testosterone addled youngsters looking for a rite of passage"
Well said vox clamantis.
I would argue that the general tendency of "hands off the trrops" as far as anything that would remotely smack of lack of support or criticism stems from the bitter rancor left over from the antiwar protests of the 1960s and 70s. Even today, the issue of how the troops were treated still brings anger to many, even to those who now see what a disaster that war was, and despite the fact that some of the strongest war critics were returned soldiers.
longingforsanity,
As a lifelong pacifist, I have always argued against that "naive" label by noting that if the pacifists in our country do not stand up and make themselves heard, the pacifists in other countries, particularly our reputed "enemies," have no chance to make a difference, because no country in the world can possibly be more threatening than ours. That was true during the days of the Soviet Union, and is of course more true today, by several orders of magnitude.
The glorification of soldiery is not in itself inappropriate. Young men (and women) who have historically stepped up to repel invaders or meet the armies of rival nations have been brave and self sacrificing souls, the insanity of war notwithstanding.
But as we are beginning to see, this is not a war. We have not been engaged in a real war or confronted a comparable enemy on a level battlefield in sixty years. So our brave troops, whose sanctity is now the administration's excuse to prolong their larcenous Iraq adventure, are not really soldiers at all. Many of them might be soldiers in their hearts, but in the context of their present deployment they are at best occupiers, at worst pirates.
Shia militiamen who are today defending their neighborhoods and families against real adversaries, Iraqi and American, look more like real soldiers to me.
Support for the troops, in my mind, includes according them the dignity of proper use - defense of the homeland from viable threats. The subversion of such honorable purposes to a debased agenda makes our sons and daughters into mercenaries and goons, and has the effect of filling their ranks less with real patriots and more with testosterone addled youngsters looking for a rite of passage. Real soldiers should be insulted by this degradation of their profession, and we should not support it.
The power of love contrasts with the power of hate. It's results are significant, be tools of that power words, actions, or simple emotions. We see it in the eyes, the body posture, the dignity with which people carry themselves. Child abuse or neglect results in such different adults from those who experience unconditional love. Neighbors who care and build community live very different lives from those who selfishly envy, belittle, neglect and treat their neighbors with contempt. It is a contrast between love and hate – community and a caste system which elevates and protects oneself while putting down others. Jesus suggested a way to evaluate the evidence of love in our actions.
John 15:13 And here is how to measure it—the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends.
Our culture wars at home and abroad, use the latest technology to give our words, our actions, and passions great power over others. An angry student with a weapon kills more than 30 people, while brawler with his fists can only hurt but a few. A nation with hatred , envy and greed sets into play economic sanctions that cause suffering for millions, escalates into warfare which kills hundreds, thousands, millions? Greed drives technology to create weapons of war gladly spent to protect excessive wealth, while food, education, and health care for those most needy at home and abroad are neglected and cut back. We want cheap oil, cheap labor, increasing profits for our wealthiest while a building rage within the poor and hungry requires greater use of force to keep control. These national policies must be popular with the common man, so we provide massive information to feed our fear, our nationalistic pride, our ambition and the illusion of being freedom fighters. Lost in the process in the opportunity to create friends with those who were strangers, brothers from those who were enemies, and community where there was conflict.
Sadly progressives have nothing new to teach the world. Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, St. Francis, and a host others, many Christian, many others from other religious traditions learned the power of love, compassion for the neighbor, justice for the poor, the weak, the hungry and the persecuted. There is a time to fight for freedom, a time to give our life in defense of others, sadly to use the weapons of war, when no other choice is available. But it is way past time for us to use the power of love, justice, and mercy. To set aside our pride, our greed, and prejudice and join arms, walk together, sit passively when arrested, and sing the songs of peace, freedom, and hope. God send us pastors inspired by Jesus, Dr. King, and the prophets of old. Deliver us from those Religious Hypocrites speaking the words of Jesus – twisted into the message of greed, power, self interest and hatred. Give us news reporters who will report on the heros who lay down their live for their friends.
A wisened elder I know made the point that 'Peace' is an abstract and not very sexy term... While- Well Being on the other hand gives us a more clear image by which to chart our course....The Department of Well Being has a nice ring to it and avoids the Department of Peace acronym-D.O.P.......E
The idea that governments, warriors and a wide range of people should work strongly toward peace is simplistic, but something to think seriously about.
The warmongers, war profiteers and chicken hawks among us must be kept in check by good and honorable people among us.
We can all be "peace officers" and "intelligence officers" who are strong, honorable and compassionate. That, and more, is what it will take to make things better.
Food for thought on this at:
"Intelligence, psychology and human heart: All are needed for success in war and peace"
PopulistAmerica.com
March 31, 2007
http://www.populistamerica.com/intelligence_psychology_and_human_heart
- - -
"Unconventional Human Intelligence Support: Navy SEAL's report"
Columnist, PopulistAmerica.com
January 7, 2007
http://www.populistamerica.com/unconventional_human_intelligence_support
Pacifists are always portrayed as naive idealists; but the neo Cons have given the lie to that. The naive "idealists" (if militray adventurism represents someone's ideals, which it apparently does, embedded in our culture as Solomon notes) are the ones who think that war can fix anything. Even when war is apparently justified, it does more harm than good. World War II bred the nuclear era and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. And, of course it bred the more routine military attacks on civilians, noted by Vonnegut, at Dresden. I would challenge anyone to tell me any war that "solved" anything. I hope to God we finally do have an anti war America.
As always, Solomon shows he is a true progressive. The universalizing of conscience to extend to institutional state violence is a crucial, core, progressive notion. From Tolstoy's references to the state-based "hypnosis" that removes conscience from regular good people, to Gandhi's non-violence, to Dr. King's non-violence, to today's progressive movement against illegal and immoral military violence, there is one common idea: we must ourselves follow the laws to which we hold others, persons and nations, to account--and--that illegal violence is also immoral, no matter who does it, no matter who is the victim--because--each human life is sacred. For Solomon's adherence to these assumption, he should be read by all progressives.
Once again Norman Solomon has said what few (if any) dare to say. I don't think I've seen anyone else take on, except in "far-left" blogs, the myth that our soldiers are always heroes, no matter how evil the war we started. He was brave to do it and I thank him, and everyone in this discussion for their thoughtful contributions. It's a start.