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WB: Not Ready to Make Nice? ++++
Billmon:
V. Hirohito Watch
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IV. More Grist for the Pander Mill
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Not for the first time I ask: Have Israeli’s political and military leaders completely lost their marbles?
III. Reckless Disregard
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II. Volunteers of America
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[T]he Israelis are doing their level best to make it appear as if nothing has changed and they’ve put nothing on the table, except a fig leaf for Madame Supertanker to use to cover her diplomatic nakedness.
Perhaps this is true — I may have underestimated both the cynicism of the Israeli PR apparatus and the domestic political pressure to achieve something that can be called a victory before the clock runs out. Or, it may simply be elaborate bluster to cover the fact that the clock has already run out. We’ll see.
I. Not Ready to Make Nice?
robert fisk on quana
Israel Kills 34 Kids in Qana
How Can We Stand By and Allow This to Go On?
By ROBERT FISK
They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. ” Mehdi Hashem, aged seven Qana,” was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy’s body lay. “Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 Qana”, “Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one Qana.” And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas’s little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father’s shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the “pinpoint accuracy” it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana as if that justified this massacre. Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about “Muslim terror” threatening ” western civilisation” as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing — a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana, whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine, has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: “For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B”. No doubt the manufacturers can call it “combat-proven” because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.
I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. “We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o’clock in the morning,” she said. “What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?”
Yesterday’s deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel’s air, sea and land bombardment of the country began on July 12 after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday’s slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as ” an ugly crime”.
Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: “Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv,” and Lebanon’s Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.
No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire, a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: “We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,” a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.
Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colorful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel’s onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun close to the scene of Israel’s last military incursion at Bint Jbeil and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.
And Mr Olmert’s reaction? After expressing his “great sorrow”, he announced that: “We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation.” But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon’s infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorized and terror is the word they used by Israel’s American-made fighter bombers. Israel’s savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.
Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Program aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too “terrified” to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army’s Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be “totally destroyed” if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel’s bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and when they do they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?
Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.
Robert Fisk
Posted by: r’giap | Jul 31 2006 21:52 utc | 33
sorry for cut & pasting but i’m not so well after some treatment & i think these articles are of capital importance :
July 31, 2006
A Nice Little War
In the Gunsight: Syria
By URI AVNERY
It is the old story about the losing gambler: he cannot stop. He continues to play, in order to win his losses back. He continues to lose and continues to gamble, until he has lost everything: his ranch, his wife, his shirt.
The same thing happens in the biggest gamble of all: war. The leaders that start a war and get stuck in the mud are compelled to fight their way ever deeper into the mud. That is a part of the very essence of war: it is impossible to stop after a failure. Public opinion demands the promised victory. Incompetent generals need to cover up their failure. Military commentators and other armchair strategists demand a massive offensive. Cynical politicians are riding the wave. The government is carried away by the flood that they themselves have let loose.
That is what happened this week, following the battle of Bint-Jbeil, which the Arabs have already started to call proudly Nasrallahgrad. All over Israel the cry goes up: Get into it! Quicker! Further! Deeper!
A day after the bloody battle, the cabinet decided on a massive mobilization of the reserves. What for? The ministers do not know. But it does not depend on them anymore, nor on the generals. The political and military leadership is tossed about on the waves of war like a boat without a rudder.
As has been said before: it is much easier to start a war than to finish one. The cabinet believes that it controls the war, but in reality it is the war that controls them. They have mounted a tiger, and can’t be sure of getting off without being torn to pieces.
War has its own rules. Unexpected things happen and dictate the next moves. And the next moves tend to be in one direction: escalation.
* * *
DAN HALUTZ, the father of this war, thought that he could eliminate Hizbullah by means of the Air Force, the most sophisticated, most efficient and the generally most-most air force in the world. A few days of massive pounding, thousands of tons of bombs on neighborhoods, roads, electricity works and ports – and that’s it.
Well, that wasn’t it, as it turned out. The Hizbullah rockets continued to land in the north of Israel, hundreds a day. The public cried out. There was no way round a ground operation. First, small, elite units were put in. That did not help. Then brigades were deployed. And now whole divisions are demanded.
First they wanted to annihilate the Hizbullah positions along the border. When it was seen that that was not enough, it was decided to conquer the hills that dominate the border. There, the Hizbullah fighters were waiting and caused heavy casualties. And the rockets continued to fly.
Now the generals are convinced that there is no alternative to occupying the whole area up to the Litani River, about 24 km from the border, in order to prevent the rockets from being launched from there. Then they will find out that they have to reach the Awali River, 40 km inside – the famous 40 km which Menachem Begin talked about in 1982.
And then? The Israeli army will be extended over a large area, and everywhere it will be exposed to guerilla attacks, of the sort Hizbullah excels in. And the missiles will continue to fly.
What next? One cannot stop. Public opinion will demand more decisive moves. Political demagogues will shout. Commentators will grumble. The people in the shelters will cry out. The generals will feel the heat. One cannot keep tens of thousands of reserve soldiers mobilized indefinitely. It is impossible to prolong a situation which paralyzes a third of the country.
Everybody will clamor to storm forwards. Where to? Towards Beirut in the North? Or towards Damascus, in the East?
* * *
THE CABINET ministers recite in unison: No! Never ever! We shall not attack Syria!
Perhaps some of them really don’t intend to. They do not dream of a war with Syria. Definitely not. But the ministers only delude themselves when they believe that they control the war. The war controls them.
When it becomes clear that nothing is helping, that Hizbullah goes on fighting and the rockets continue to fly, the political and military leadership will face bankruptcy. They will need to pin the blame on somebody. On who? Well, on Assad, of course.
How is it possible that a small “terror organization”, with a few thousand fighters altogether, goes on fighting? Where do they get the arms from? The finger will point towards Syria.
Even now, the army commanders assert that new rockets are flowing all the time from Syria to Hizbullah. True, the roads have been bombed, the bridges destroyed, but the arms somehow continue to arrive. The Israeli government demands that an international force be stationed not only along the Israeli-Lebanese border, but on the Lebanese-Syrian border, too. The queue of volunteers will not be long.
Then the generals will demand the bombing of roads and bridges inside Syria. For that, the Syrian Air Force will have to be neutralized. In short, a real war, with implications for the whole Middle East.
* * *
EHUD OLMERT and Amir Peretz did not think about that when they decided 17 days ago in haste and light heartedly, without serious debate, without examining other options, without calculating the risks, to attack Hizbullah. For politicians who do not know what war is, it was an irresistible temptation: there was a clear provocation by Hizbullah, international support was assured, what a wonderful opportunity! They would do what even Sharon did not dare.
Dan Halutz submitted an offer that could not be refused. A nice little war. Military plans were ready and well rehearsed. Certain victory. The more so, since on the other side there was no real enemy army, just a “terror organization”.
How hotly the desire was burning in the hearts of Olmert and Peretz is attested by the fact that they did not even think about the lack of shelters in the Northern towns, not to mention the far-reaching economic and social implications. The main thing was to rush in and gather the laurels.
They had no time to think seriously about the war aim. Now they resemble archers who shoot their arrows at a blank sheet and then draw the rings around the arrow. The aims change daily: to destroy Hizbullah, to disarm them, to drive them out of South Lebanon, and perhaps just to “weaken” them. To kill Hassan Nasrallah. To bring the captured soldiers home. To extend the sovereignty of the Lebanese government over all of Lebanon. To establish a new-old Security Zone occupied by Israel. To deploy the Lebanese army and/or an international force along the border. To rehabilitate deterrence. To imprint into the consciousness of Hizbullah. (Our generals love imprinting into consciousnesses. That is a wonderfully safe aim, because it cannot be measured.)
* * *
THE MORE the nice little war continues, the clearer it becomes that these changing aims are not realistic. The Lebanese ruling group does not represent anybody but a small, rich and corrupt elite. The Lebanese army cannot and will not fight Hizbullah. The new “security zone” will be exposed to guerilla attacks and the international force will not enter the area without the agreement of Hizbullah. And this guerilla force, Hizbullah, the Israeli army cannot vanquish.
That is nothing to be ashamed of. Our army is in good – or, rather, bad – company. The term “guerilla” (“small war”) was coined in Spain, during the occupation of the country by Napoleon. Irregular bands of Spanish fighters attacked the occupiers and beat them. The same happened to the Russians in Afghanistan, to the French in Algeria, to the British in Palestine and a dozen other colonies, to the Americans in Vietnam, and is happening to them now in Iraq. Even assuming that Dan Halutz and Udi Adam are greater commanders than Napoleon and his marshals, they will not succeed where those failed.
When Napoleon did not know what to do next, he invaded Russia. If we don’t stop the operation, it will lead us to war with Syria.
Condoleezza Rice’s stubborn struggle against any attempt to stop the war shows that this is indeed the aim of the United States. From the first day of George Bush’s presidency, the neo-cons have been calling for the elimination of Syria. The deeper Bush sinks into the Iraqi quagmire, the more he needs to divert attention with another adventure.
By the way: One day before the outbreak of this war, our Minister of National Infrastructures, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, took part in the inauguration ceremony of the big pipeline that will conduct oil from the huge Caspian Sea reserves to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, just next to the Syrian border. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline avoids Russia and passes through Azerbaijan and Georgia, two countries closely aligned with Israel, like Turkey itself. There is a plan to bring a part of the oil from there along the Syrian and Lebanese coast to Ashkelon, where an existing pipeline will conduct it to Eilat, to be exported to the Far East. Israel and Turkey are to secure the area for the United States.
* * *
MUST THE sliding into a war with Syria happen? Is there no alternative?
Of course there is. To stop now, at once.
When President Lyndon Johnson felt that he was sinking into the morass of Vietnam, he asked his friends for advice. One of them answered with five words: “Declare victory and get out!”
We can do that. To stop investing more and more in a losing business. To be satisfied with what we can get now. For example: an agreement that will move Hizbullah a few kilometers from the border, along which an international force and/or the Lebanese army will be deployed, and to exchange prisoners. Olmert will be able to present that as a great victory, to claim that we have got what we wanted, that we have taught the Arabs a lesson, that anyhow we had no intention of achieving more. Nasrallah will also claim a great victory, asserting that he has taught the Zionist Enemy a lesson it will not forget, that Hizbullah remains alive, strong and armed, that he has brought back the Lebanese prisoners.
True, it will not be much. But that is what can be done to cut losses, as they say in the business world.
That can happen. If Olmert is clever enough to extricate himself from the trap, before it closes entirely. (As folk wisdom says: a clever person is one that gets out of a trap that a wise one would not have got into in the first place.) And if Condoleezza gets orders from her boss to allow it.
* * *
ON THE 17th day of the war , we must recognize that soon we will be faced with a clear choice: to slide into a war with Syria, intentionally or unintentionally, or to get a general agreement in the North, that will necessarily involve also Hizbullah and Syria. At the center of such an agreement will be the Golan Heights.
Olmert and Peretz did not think about that in those intoxicating moments on July 12, when they jumped at the opportunity to start a nice little war. But then, were they thinking at all?
Uri Avnery
Posted by: r’giap | Jul 31 2006 22:04 utc | 35
@#15
Collective Suicide
The American-Israeli New Middle East
The War We Are Fighting
A pretty good article, as far as it goes…
Except he over-emphasizes the threat from religious fundamantalism. The elite of the world are trying to conquer and subdue the rest of the world without creating a state where they would loose their rights; now a two-tiered system, well, that is altogether different. They are also trying to take over the world without destroying it. The rich want to be able to enjoy their booty even more than the rest of us. No corporate elites are donating their money to political coffers in the expectation of instant annihilation; no, the expectation is of ever increasing quarterly profits.
Let’s take a minute here to talk a little bit more deeply about what is happening in the middle east, and how it is a part of the larger war that we are facing.
Now, I trust that everyone here has heard of the Project For a New American Century, and the various US security statements issued over the past decade which officially support this plan. I even assume that some here have taken the time to read these documents.
Let us remind ourselves what is at stake here; what the war is REALLY about. It is stated explicitly that the US is attempting to completely control the world. Militarily, it is quite explicit what this entails: control of all regions and all competitors; control of land, sea, air, and even space.
But it goes much further than this. You see, the Neo-Conservative military vision is completely consistent with the Neo-Liberal trade vision. They are two sides of one coin, and taken together as a whole, they represent the elite plan for our world.
Besides complete military dominance, complete intellectual control is being instituted. This means the media, and its ownership, which defines acceptable limits to discourse. This means entertainment, which defines the acceptable limits of our imagination. This means medicine, what products are developed and for whom, how health care is meted out and to whom — literally who shall live and who shall die, and who shall be permitted to exist on a provisional basis to provide necessary services while somaed up with anti-depressants. This means control over finance, who has access to money and credit and who does not. More importantly, the scales are being irrevocably tilted in favor of wealth over wage, that is to say, that accumulated wealth is allowed to keep accruing, while wages, necessary for those without wealth, are being cut to subsisdence levels.
Most importantly, control of the world means control of life itself. The military effects of this policy are quite apparent. But just as important is corporate control over our foodstocks. Mankind subsists on a mere 14 crops and 12 domesticated animals. These are all being brought under corporate control through genetic engineering and sterile seeds. GMO is an inherently leaky technology, which is to say, it is designed to leak beyond its boundaries of farm and field, and infect the entire world. Almost all the soybeans grown throughout the world have been infected. Almost all the corn in the world has also already been infected with GMO genes; this includes the hundreds of different varieties assiduously cultivated over hundreds of years in Central and South America. As Genetically modified material escapes its biological containers, more and more species will be owned by corporations, and they will control who has access to its property. This is an irreversable process, and it is already underway. The level of this crime is comparable to the entire earth being contaminated by nuclear radiation. It is irreversable, and its effects are unknowable.
Small, independent farmers growing fruits and vegetables beyond the core crops are being methodically bankrupted and devastated. We see this in Lebanon and Iraq. Their production will switch to a “more efficient” export oriented, corporate model of huge farms, with expensive petrochemical inputs, and serf-like labor conditions, as in Chile, and much of Central America. In a word, we are returning to an era of plantations, except without the need for costly economic investment in slaves. Organic agriculture, you say? Do the research — it is being run on the same corporate plantation model, with as much centralization as in media.
Energy. The same thing. The Corporate elite don’t care whether you heat you home with oil, or natural gas, or nuclear power, coal, wind, solar, or even by burning trees in a woodstove. What they care about, is that they OWN and CONTROL and PROFIT from the energy source you do use. That’s what all this talk about Peak Oil is really about. Own, Control, Profit. Get it?
We are running the world, not according to the oft-lauded “Precautionary Principle,” but rather, on its Bizarro world opposite, the “Catastrophic Principle.” We will keep moving blindly forward, in the interest of ever greater corporate profits, until we crash and burn.
So, let us get this straight. There is one, and only one, war. It may have military manifestations in various parts of the globe from time to time, as we see now in the Middle East, but it may also have manifestations under the wire of public perception, in the courtrooms of the globe, and in meetings of WTO, IMF, GATS and other supranational unaccountable arganizations and bodies. We were told that explicitly when they rolled out the “War on Terror.” It is not conspiracy theory. It is explicit government policy.
The goal again, is complete control over everything. All property, all wealth and capital, all mineral resources, and all life forms.
That is the true nature of the war being fought, and we should not forget it. They are not guaranteed to win, but the odds are stacked heavily in their favor by the same “facts on the ground” that we see employed in Palestine making change inevitable: GMO facts, radiation facts, new uncurable diseases, being developed at new bio-labs throughout the country, facts.
Facts, facts, facts. We have to face the facts squarely and honestly, and educate others to do the same. Education is slow and hard. Yet, there is no quicker way.
If you attempted to explain what I have written about above to others, most people would call you a raving lunatic, a conspiracy theorist. But, you could show them the documents. Yes, everything I have written above is explicit government policy.
In other words, it is not conspiracy, it is policy. And policy is overt, explicit, and can be changed.
But you have to talk people down from the culture wars, and the two-minute hate. You have to talk people down from the magical belief in saviors, that sites like KOS promote. You have to educate people to read and understand documents. And then you have to get them to read the relevant documents and policies. Then you have to get them to believe what the government has written, because most of it is simply so far beyond the ken, or conception, of the ordinary person that they simply will not believe it.
The myth of American benevolence is so strong, so regularly indoctrinated and reinforced, that it is very, very difficult for most people to ever confront it.
It is also too scary for most people to believe. The policies say nothing about American Idol, or NASCAR, or FIFA, or eco-tourism, or swimming with dolphins, or rock music, or any of the other temporal detritus that we are trained to focus our consciousness upon. Yes, it is a learned behavior, this focus on the irrelevant, the reassuring, the knowable, the safe, what we call culture, and which civilization foists upon us.
So, when trying to explain the true nature, and scope, of this total war to your friends and family, to the average non-political American, or even the average liberal, one must be gentle, very gentle, because the whole edifice of belief that keeps their life humming, that gets them up in the morning looking forward to the four cups of coffee they need to get through the day because of their failing, overloaded adrenals — this whole edifice of belief will come crashing down just as frighteningly and inexplicably and uncontrollably and twistedly as the twin towers came crashing down around us, in dust and flame, on 9-11.
So, be gentle. But be persistent. For, most assuredly, we are born into a terminal condition on this earth, and yet no one can deny that there is still much joy and love. So be persistent; push on towards the breakthrough — if ordinary Lebanese are brave enough to fight with their only lives against invasion, then even us etiolated first-worlders are strong enough to know and face the nature of the war we confront.
Push on, push on, until all know and understand the nature of the war being waged against all of us. Only then can we assuredly stop it.
We have been consistently told by our own government that this is a long and total war. Now that we understand its true nature, we can see that all of us, like it or not, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, all of us, by our every action, are fighters in this war. Maybe Bush was right when he said that you are either with us or against us.
But this total war poses an existential choice of being for all of us. We are all fighters in this war, on one side or the other. And we are all independent actors, masters of our soul. We are sovereign guerillas. Only we can decide how we want to fight and when. Only we can decide which face of corporatism and jingoism and empire we wish to confront.
Only we can find the peace that our souls so earnestly desire through doing what we know to be right and fighting in this war. Some might call it confronting evil. Others might say we are doing good. I think what is most important is simply that we do not sign off into the numbing comfort of trivia –like the field of soporific poppies in the “Wizard of Oz” — and do not give in because of fear, apathy and hopelessness, as they expect of us. I think that what is important is that at the end of our days we can recall the good fight and simply say, “I was present.”
Posted by: Malooga | Jul 31 2006 23:59 utc | 44
Just to add:
This is not a war between nations, per say, or even coalitions of nations, as we are led to believe. Nations can be proxies in this fight of control. And corporations can lurk behind the scenes, like puppetmasters, and pull the strings.
But it is primarily a war between two different ways of being, of relating to the world.
On one side, we have original and indigenous wisdom, ancient and timeless, which sees Man’s place as lying within the mandala of life, the total schema of the world. Man interrelates within the world, and his job is to find that perfect position of balance within an ever-changing, yet, steady-state system. Man is wholly embedded within a fully relational system with all other entities, which we Westerners consider as living and non-living, as well as seen and unseen. Knowledge can be scientific, but it can also be mystical, personal, and experiential. Both are revered and transmittable. Yet scientific knowledge, to be integrated within the system, is given its own esoteric meaning, and sets of relationships. These belief traits, shared by many distinct, and often quite superficially different, ancient societies around the world is often known as Indigenism today.
One the other side, we have the Man of the Old Testament (Yes, it is shocking for those of us who pride ourselves on being so modern, to discover that we hold such an archaic view of the world.), who holds dominion over the rest of the world, having been given it from God — inexplicably, without an operating plan or any useful guidance for managing the complex, incompletely understood, system. Everything is human-centric. From this limited vison, our entire hubristic, and egocentric, way of relating to the world devolves.
Since the many Gods, of many cultures, were manifestly created in Man’s many images, to answer his needs in dealing with the vast and oft-confusing world; so too, the many covenants between God and Man were drafted to give Man some particular advantage or another. In this case, the advantage gained by our forebears from their God, was immeadiate, decisive, and substantial.
Man, within society, related to his own God according to rules of his own drafting. Furthermore, he, through the agencies of his appointed priesthood, was empowered to judge how well he and others were complying. This gave any man within a society an inherent superiority over any man from outside the society, since those outside, being less familiar with the esoteric rules, did not comply as fully. In other words, Jewish and Christian society had set up its own esoteric, innate, built-in system of superiority over other societies. From this insight, an hierarchical, as oppossed to the previous relational, system of being was instituted.
Hierarchical systems need methods of preserving their inequalities. Technical progress promised this edge, and so was embraced.
All societies progressed technically in providing food and shelter for its members. But Western societies, spurred on by empirical evidence of their own superiority (because other societies did not comply as well with secret, esoteric rules), and in need of a way of establishing and perpetuating this moral dominance, made especially rapid progress in the arts of weapons and warfare.
Societies that embraced these beliefs progressed faster technically, and dominated other societies, and spread around the world.
To recapitulate, this current dominant worldview saw man as having dominion over the rest of creation, without any particular covenant of stewardship. Remember, this is not so strange since these progenitors chose their particular God, and endowed him with the qualities they desired, and then set up their own rules to the game. Pretty heady stuff. This led to an embrace of technology, and a domination over other societies.
But the lack of an explicit covenant with nature, with the external world, set up a state of imbalance much like a rapidly growing cancer. Man killed off other men and other whole societies.
As he spread geographically, unrestrained by covenant, he began killing off other species with the same blind impudence. Derrick Jensen refers to this killing as murder. He makes the following distinction: Man has always had to kill to live, just as other carniverous animals have. But other species of animals would never kill off their entire prey, the whole species which they depend upon for sustenence, as that would spell suicide for their own species, too. Man, in his dominion, has faced no such restrictions. He has blithely killed off whole species for both food and fun (cf. The great Buffalo massacres of the 1850’s-1890). This ignorant reordering of nature, done with wanton disregard for consequence, Jensen calls murder.
So, what we have seen develop is a fundamentalist, cult-like, culture with a pathological belief in its moral superiority and dominion, to other men and, indeed, the rest of the world. It is bound by no covenant limiting its relationship with the external world, and it has no sense of stewardship for life forms which cannot compete with it on its terms. This culture has always trusted technological superiority as a way of preserving and extending its hegemony over everything else.
Alas, you all know the answer to this riddle. This is the society in which we currently live, and of which so many of us are proud. Oftentimes proud to the point of killing off both those we seek to rule over, but also those which we depend upon. This killing is called murder, and by any rational, impartial, and not inordinately solipsistic, moral system, is evil. We are members of a cult-like society, whose fundamental solipsitic beliefs are intrinsically evil.
This society is currently fighting two wars. One is the war I described above, in my previous posting, a war of dominion against all else. This war is fundamentally pathological, evil, and immoral.
The second war is more complex and it is pathetic. It is a war against the contradictions within our belief systems. You might say it is a war with reality.
George Bush has said that we are an empire and that we create our own realities. This is true, on the simple “facts on the ground” level. But everything we create, every change we engineer has consequences we didn’t consider, or expect. These we call “externalities.”
Some externalities are merely annoying, or troublesome, yet treatable. Introducing alien species into new ecosystems where they have no predators is an common example.
But other externalities are potentially suicidal to our culture, especially in an ever-shrinking world.
Radioactive contamination through nuclear accidents, emissions, spills, DU, and weapons testing and detonation, if left unchecked will eventually kill us all. We can “decare war” upon this externality, but we cannot defeat it by bombing it. We can only defeat it by seeing through our pathological belief system, and changing the rules by which we relate to the world.
Another externality we are currently facing is our belief in perpetual growth. Again, we cannot bomb these limits away. (Though we can forestall the approach of this limit, to a certain extent, by continually bombing human beings as a desperate method of population and resource control.) While these limits may be somewhat elastic, we cannot ultimately defeat them. We can only change our belief systems to accept these limits to our existence.
There are many such externalities which we face, some obvious, and some still unseen, and our worldview is creating more of them all the time.
Now, it is easy to see why this war with reality is pathetic. We simply cannot win all the battles we face. Nor do our usual tactics for confronting adversity help us at all in these situations.
Perpetuating the behavior which causes these externalities to arise is also evil. F. Scott Peck defines evil as, “the exercise of political power — that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion — in order to avoid…spiritual growth. In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures.” Sound familiar?
We can only win these wars by graciously admitting defeat, and gradually ceding our dominion over the world. In other words, we can only continue existing by dropping our disfunctional worldview, and adopting an indigenous worldview. We simply must come to see ourselves as having to learn to fit in with the rest of the world. Despite all the damage we have done, despite all the harm to other humans, other species, and the earth itself, which we have caused, I am absolutely certain that the rest of the world will accept us back into the natural order once we decide to change.
However, if we do not change, we will only be fighting an increasingly unwinnable war, a pathetic war, a hopeless war, a desperate war, an unnecessary war, and an increasingly angry and destructive war.
If we do not, we will be like Captain Ahab himself, raging against all manner of unfortunate consequence, until we, too, go down with the ship.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 1 2006 3:08 utc | 48
The message in the e-mails is that Dean wants an “evenhanded” policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I had a divorce like that once. We split everything right down the middle. She got all the assets, and I got all the debts. Badda-boom!
@r’giap and b real
Thanks for the vote. I don’t have email going these days, or I would have sent them to b. I didn’t realize that they would be so long when I started writting them.
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@ mistah charley:
Thanks for your criticism. Whenever I “dump a load” like this, I am never aware of how long it will be, or where it is going. I just feel troubled and start writing off the top of my head. Obviously, this is a blog, and not a work of art, so clearly my thinking is more provisional than finished carpentry.
I write to this blog in order to get criticism from those I respect. The more I am attacked, the better I am able to revise my theories.
That said, let’s move to specifics:
Malooga is looking at the big picture
Very much so.
In my opinion, thinking is given too much importance in M.’s view of social structures as emerging from dominant worldviews. Every social animal has social hierarchies – these by no means flow from human thought.
I agree with your basic thrust here. This is a quandary. We are supposed to differ from animals to the extent that we can sublimate our base instincts and employ reason. But, clearly, how to incorporate innate tendencies into theory is difficult. I’m not sure where to proceed.
And I don’t think that nonhuman prey animals always avoid exterminating the species on which they feed – this depends on a number of factors – and in fact, the introduction of exotic competitive or predatory species into new areas quite explicitly shows that extinction can flow from non-human factors. Likewise, when human populations wipe out species, as happened when people first came to the Americas, the perpetrators sometimes subscribed to the “indigenist” world view.
No quibbling on facts here, either. However, we are suppossed to have reached a point in our development where such extinctions of species are forseen, controlled, or are, at the very least, non-threatening. But the rate of species extinction, and our lack of knowledge about the webs which interconnect, belie this. As far as other societies within our own species, the rate of extinction proceeds apace. Our propaganda trumpets democracy, but it is a very voracious democracy (as Uncle $cam points out on another thread), in so far as gobbling up other societies which do not operate on a capitalist basis, to say the least.
What people “think” is only one factor behind what they do, in other words, and I believe M. overrates the importance of ideology and Weltanschauung (easy for us intellectuals to do).
Overdetermination. Agreed. I invite you to expand on this in the light of what I have written.
And, on the other hand, M. seems to me to underrate the importance of the scientific method as a way of finding out what’s going on. Science and technology is like a knife, may I suggest; it has many uses, and while it cannot tell us the meaning of life, which is found with a different method, it can give us information about how things happen, without which we make serious mistakes. This is necessary, but not sufficient – a moral reformation is also necessary, a rehumanization, which may yet still be within our reach. The world problematique we face today cannot be resolved without scientific information, although we also need a change of heart. Can it be done? See David Korten’s new book The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community for a vision of what might happen.
I have not read the book, yet. Thanks for the recommendation. Here the difference is on point of emphasis. You believe that scientific information, within the context of a moral reformation, is essential. I believe that the moral reformation is most essential, though moral isn’t the word I used. Conceptual is much better. Only then can any tools, technological among them, be properly employed.
I don’t believe that technology, or science is amoral (To use Soros’ famous word concerning his investment strategy). I believe that we are amoral, and until that is corrected, until we re-order our place within the universe from dominating the universe, to equally interrelating, we will continue to create “Hiroshimas” of ever greater impact, until we threaten the existence of all of life.
I think that we will find we have much less use of technology and science once the changeover has been effected. (We will also have much less use of “jobs,” even scientific ones.) Tremendous amounts of science these days amounts to little more than crumbling buttresses, failing to support the non-sustainable edifice of capitalism and endless growth. Science, to say more development is OK, and science, as asymptote, continually approaching the limits of sustainabilty, closer and closer, like some college calculus exercise, will become vestigial if we can change our consciousness. Justificatory science, even down to the level of Nature shows on PBS, which paint man as a wise and concerned steward over life, will become unnecessary. Why should I be interested in the fate of lions, for instance, 10,000 miles away from me, unless I do not trust those closer (we know the term for this), or unless I, as human, in some subtle way, still need to assert my hegemony over them.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 1 2006 20:01 utc | 59
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