Category Archives: culture

Saturday Matinee: Seobok

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REVIEW: ‘Seobok: Project Clone’ Is a Well-balanced Philosophical Sci-Fi Action Film

By Ricardo Gallegos

Source: But Why Tho?

Lee-Yong Ju’s science fiction film Seobok: Project Clone delves into one of the genre’s most prominent philosophical concerns: the fate of men. And even though it tends to ponder on too many ideas, it manages to create food for thought while providing jaw-dropping setpieces.

Former intelligence agent Min Ki-hun (Gong Yoo) is struggling both physically and emotionally. The regret of his past is consuming him and a brain tumor has left him with little time to live. One day, he’s asked by former boss Ahn (Jo Woo-jin) to return to action in a secret mission involving the protection of project Seobok (Park Bo-gum), the first human clone who, besides possessing pressure bending powers, is immortal and therefore is the key to the research that could save Ki-hun’s life. However, what seems like a straightforward task soon puts Ki-hun in the middle of a war to possess (or kill) Seobok that involves American mercenaries, government officials, and the laboratory involved in the research. Still unsure on who to trust, Ki-hun sticks to protecting Seobok, and, together, they go on the run.

With a strong sci-fi core, Seobok: Project Clone tips its toes into the road movie genre in a second act full of ethical conundrums. From very different angles, Ki-hun and Seobok are forced to reflect on their mortality while driving through highways and cities. The former realizes that in order to be cured, Seobok has to be exploited, which is something other characters see as perfectly fine given that he’s, after all, some sort of sub-human experiment. Does Seobok have moral rights? What are their limits? If he was created for research only, shouldn’t his suffering and exploitation be unimportant? The movie asks these questions to both the audiences and Ki-hun, whose condition worsens as time goes by.

Meanwhile, Seobok learns about humanity with every interaction and blood-soaked encounter and eventually asks himself what the meaning of immortality is. Should he allow humans to stop death by researching him? As Seobok ponders on this question, the inhumanity around him grows, and soon, the true colors of our world make clear that, ultimately, only wealthy men would be able to get the ‘benefits’ from immortality.

Gong Yoo and Park Bo-gum’s beautifully nuanced performance gives power to these thoughts, but they can’t stop the whole road movie section from being bogged down by the high number of philosophical queries the film lays out, none of which are thoroughly explored. Because of this, you’ll find yourself losing interest in the motivation of the characters, even more, due to the dull pace of the editing.

Eventually, your patience and investment are rewarded when Lee-Yong Ju successfully transforms these philosophical conundrums into emotional fuel for a spectacular action-packed third act where everything comes full circle. Aided by top-notch VFX work and sound design, as well as an extraordinary score by Yeong-wook Jo, Seobok’s powers are used in a terrifying manner to lead the film toward an outstanding conclusion that provides audiovisual and narrative satisfaction; and thanks to the correct development of his character arc throughout the film, Seobok’s never reduced to a just a killing tool. His actions and realizations are consequences of his experiences outside the laboratory and his interactions with Ki-hun.

Seobok: Project Clone is a riveting balance of philosophy, sci-fi, and action with a hint of road movie goodness that never sacrifices its complex questions in lieu of cheap entertainment. The issues at hand are never forgotten even when the most visual effects-heavy scenes fill the screen, and that’s something not many films of this nature are able to do.

Watch Seobok on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14858932

Hedges: The Pimps of War

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Whores of War, original illustration by Mr. Fish.

The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence. 

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.

I spent  20 years as a foreign correspondent reporting on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams — convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair and later  pardoned by President George H.W. Bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War — and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America — were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting.

They, and their coterie of fellow war lovers, went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, violating an agreement not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany and recklessly antagonizing Russia. They were and are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel, justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel’s interests with our own. They advocated for air strikes in Serbia, calling for the US to “take out” Slobodan Milosevic. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April 2002 that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.”

We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity-generating plants and nearly all the water-pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period when 90,000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and failed states. The war in Iraq, along with the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, shredded the illusion of US military and global hegemony. It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, the widespread killing of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the region. They continue to call for a war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating that “there is nothing we can do short of attacking to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons.” They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela. They have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua.

They embrace a purblind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences, or its inevitable blowback. They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration. They believe in their divine right to impose their “values” on others by force. Fiasco after fiasco. Now they are stoking a war with Russia.

“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš observed. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images — as nationalists.”

The Biden administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs. Antony Blinken is secretary of state. Jake Sullivan is national security advisor. They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded The Institute for the Study of War, William Kristol, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum, and others. Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. 

They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever expanding military. Julian Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”

They once railed against liberal weakness and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.

These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust.  They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars.

Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the US during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General René Schneider, and President Salvador Allende), the Bay of Pigs, the atrocities and war crimes that defined the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.” The world, Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All US interventions are a fight for freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.

The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then wait for a crisis — they call it the next Pearl Harbor — to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment of Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.” Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dared be seen as soft on national security. The act stated that the United States government would work to “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq war during the administration of George W. Bush.

The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knows nothing about the Muslim world, wrote that “the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory…The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again…is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the [Middle East] is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.” Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.”  

It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the US.

They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now [author’s emphasis].”

They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israeli-Palestinian morass. In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and rightwing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of US troops in Gaza so we could “take the war to these people.” They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “we need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.”  His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected President Viktor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for US troops to be sent to Syria to assist “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Basha al-Assad. Instead, the intervention spawned the Caliphate. The US ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad’s de facto air force.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will.

“It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, lamenting our refusal to militarily confront Russia earlier. “But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”

In short, don’t worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won’t use the bomb.

I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like The Council on Foreign Relations or The Brookings Institution, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable. When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangeloves, if we don’t stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.

The Inflation Crisis Of 2022 Is Now Worse Than Anything That We Experienced During The 1970s

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

Most Americans don’t realize this, but we truly have entered historic territory.  As you will see below, the inflation crisis of 2022 has now escalated to a level that is beyond anything that we experienced during the horrible Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s.  If you are old enough to have been alive back then, you probably remember the constant headlines about inflation.  And you also probably remember that it seemed like the impotent administration in power in Washington was powerless to do anything about it.  In other words, it was a lot like what we are going through today.  Unfortunately for us, this new economic crisis is still only in the very early chapters.

Of course the mainstream media would like us to believe that what we are experiencing today is not even close to what Americans went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  According to CNN, the U.S. inflation rate hit a peak of 14.6 percent in the first half of 1980…

The inflation rate hit a record high of 14.6% in March and April of 1980. It helped to lead to Carter’s defeat in that fall’s election. It also led to some significant changes in the US economy.

Compared to that, the numbers we have been given in early 2022 seem rather tame.  On Tuesday, we learned that the official rate of inflation in the U.S. hit 8.5 percent in the month of March…

Prices that consumers pay for everyday items surged in March to their highest levels since the early days of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.

The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, jumped 8.5% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis, above even the already elevated Dow Jones estimate for 8.4%.

8.5 percent is much lower than 14.6 percent, and so to most people it would seem logical to conclude that we are still a long way from the kind of nightmarish crisis that our nation endured during the waning days of the Carter administration.

But is that the truth?

In reality, we can’t make a straight comparison between the official rate of inflation in 2022 and the official rate of inflation in 1980.  The way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since 1980, and every time it was changed the goal was to make the official rate of inflation appear to be lower.

What we really need is an apples-to-apples comparison; fortunately, John Williams over at shadowstats.com has done the math for us.

According to Williams, if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere around 17 percent right now.

17 percent!

That means that the inflation that we are seeing now is even worse than anything that Americans went through during the Jimmy Carter era.

And government figures for individual categories seem to confirm that inflation is now wildly out of control.  For example, the price of gasoline has risen by 48 percent over the past year…

The price of gasoline rose by 48.0 percent from March 2021 to March 2022, according to numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In just one month—from February to March—the seasonally adjusted price of gasoline went up 18.3 percent.

Vehicle prices have escalated to absurd levels as well.  If you can believe it, the average retail selling price of a used vehicle at CarMax has risen by 39.7 percent in just 12 months…

CarMax experienced a slowdown in fourth-quarter used car sales volume as its average retail selling price jumped 39.7% year-over-year to $29,312, an increase of approximately $8,300 per unit.

And I discussed yesterday, home prices in the United States have jumped 32.6 percent over the past two years.

We have entered a full-blown inflationary nightmare, and the Biden administration is trying to blame Vladimir Putin for it.

Needless to say, that is extremely disingenuous of Biden, because prices were already skyrocketing even before the war in Ukraine started.

But it is true that the war is making economic problems even worse all over the globe, and that isn’t going to end any time soon.

A couple of weeks ago there was a bit of optimism that some sort of a ceasefire agreement could be reached, but now there appears to be no hope that there will be one any time soon.

On Tuesday, Putin told the press that peace talks have reached “a dead end”…

Talks with Ukraine have reached “a dead end,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in fresh Tuesday remarks. “We will not stop military operations in Ukraine until they succeed.” He explained that Ukraine has “deviated” from agreements and any possible prior progress reached during the Istanbul meetings, according to state-run RIA.

The strong remarks aimed at both Kiev and the West were given during a joint presser with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. He further hailed that the military operations is still going “according to plan,” Bloomberg reports, however while admitting to the domestic population that “Russian logistics and payment systems remain a weakness and the long-term impact of western measures could be more painful.” But he also said the county has withstood the economic “blitzkrieg” from the West.

And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now saying that the return of Crimea is a “red line” for him…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named recognition of the annexation of the Crimea region as one of his red lines for Moscow in any potential peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end war between the two countries.

Russia annexed the southern region of Crimea in 2014. Russian-backed separatists and forces, as well Ukrainian soldiers, have since been fighting in the eastern region of Ukraine.

Russia will never, ever willingly give Crimea back to Ukraine.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply being delusional.

So unless someone changes their tune, this war between Russia and Ukraine is going to keep going until someone achieves total victory.

And that could take a really long time.

Meanwhile, global food supplies will get tighter and tighter, and global economic conditions will continue to rapidly deteriorate.

In other words, the kind of nightmare scenario that I have been warning about for years is now upon us.

And so what happens if another “black swan event” or two hits us later in 2022?

We are so vulnerable right now, and it wouldn’t take much at all to push us over the edge and into an unprecedented worldwide crisis of epic proportions.

‘We the People’ Are the New, Permanent Underclass in America

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We are now speeding down the road of wasteful spending and debt, and unless we can escape we will be smashed in inflation.”—Herbert Hoover

This is financial tyranny.

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who must foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $30 trillion and growing. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer.

Now the Biden administration is proposing a $5.8 trillion spending budget that notably includes $813 billion for national defense, $30 billion to “fund the police,” and a plan to reduce the national deficit by roughly $1 trillion over 10 years through additional tax hikes.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Essentially, the U.S. government is funding its very existence with a credit card.

In 2021, we paid more than $562 billion in interest on that public debt, which according to journalist Rob Garver, “is more than the annual budget of every individual federal agency except for the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services (which manages the Medicare and Medicaid government health insurance programs), and the Department of Defense.”

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

Clearly, the national debt isn’t going away anytime soon, especially not with government spending on the rise and interest payments making up such a large chunk of the budget.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

We’re not living the American dream. We’re living a financial nightmare.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we’re the ones who will have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that staggering $6 trillion is only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, in response to Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, the Biden Administration approved $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, with an additional $200 million for immediate military assistance.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex will continue to get richer, while the American taxpayer will be forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

Unfortunately, we’ve become so invested in identity politics that pit us against one another and keep us powerless and divided that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

Trust me, we’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”

There is power in our numbers.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might).

Where we lose out is when we fall for the big-talking politicians who spend big at our expense.

Thralldom and Its Uses

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Spring is always convulsive, with new things heaving into life. Under every dead leaf, something stirs and seeks light, the old must make way for the new, and to some degree the earth is not quite the same place as it was the last time it turned, though the scene looks superficially familiar. Winter’s torpor is, at least, a cold comfort, but springtime’s warmth and movement rattle the nerves. Things unseen shift ominously beneath us. Everything is pending and tending, and nothing is resolved.

Having wrecked its latest business model —hypertrophic financial fakery — Western Civ stumbles into the blinding new reality that it takes real stuff to run an economy, and that money itself is not an adequate replacement for the stuff. The trillions supposedly vested, for instance, in stock market valuations mostly represent mere wishes and promises, and for what? Why, for more money — which responds by losing value, so that we’re racing ever faster toward a receding horizon.

The net result: a world with less available stuff and plenty of money that’s increasingly worthless in pursuit of stuff. It isn’t long before people recognize the disutility of both conditions. The idea that we can fix this problem with central bank digital money is hilarious. When faced with less available stuff, resorting to “money” ever more abstracted from any relation to stuff only puts you in thrall to more empty wishes and promises when this is exactly the moment to be less in thrall and more in touch.

America has had enough of being in thrall, especially to figures and forces dedicated to our destruction. This spring is the beginning of a national life with less stuff, including, looks like, stuff to eat. That will sure enough put folks in touch with something real, and then they will naturally have to do something about it. Centralized control of the population via trackable digital money is the last thing that will avail in the face of hunger and desperation. In fact, that is just another set of empty wishes and promises.

The reality is that centralized government, such as the one in Washington DC, is less and less in control of anything — except the manufactured pretense that it can fix the problems of less stuff and decaying money. The federal government is increasingly impotent, unable to discharge its basic obligations to preserve public order and safety. Its previous attempt to fix something was the response to Covid-19, which has culminated in the fiasco of the mRNA vaccines, now pending and tending toward an astounding wave of early deaths among those in thrall to the transparently dishonest promises of officialdom (“safe and effective”).

That’s the trouble with thrall. It narrows the field-of-vision so badly, you can’t see what’s coming at you indirectly, like: hardship and death. The country has been in serious trouble for more than a decade. Cavalcades of bad choices — and then lying to ourselves about these bad choices — has shoved us well over the edge of our cherished expectations. One way out, then, is to simply refuse to remain in thrall to officialdom and the manufactured bullshit that is its only product.

We are lately in thrall to the melodrama in Ukraine, largely engineered by figures and forces in our own government and for their own ends, which look suspiciously at odds with the nation’s actual interests (the nation being us, its people). Perhaps this illustrates the widening gulf between the slouching beast government has become and the people trying to operate their lives and destinies under it. No food for you, no fertilizers for future food for you, no spare parts for you, no free speech for you, no social or economic role for you, no health for you, and (watch it, now!) soon no life for you.

Collectively going crazy has been a luxury we can’t afford anymore. You fell for RussiaGate and it kept you in thrall for years. You fell for the Adam Schiff orchestrated Ukraine phone call impeachment gambit. You fell for the Covid scare and the dangerously defective vaccines forced on you. You fell for the fraud-drenched election of the empty vessel known as “Joe Biden.” Don’t fall for the invitation to World War Three.

Russia means business in its historic sphere of influence. It’s none of our business, and we’re only making it worse for the Ukrainian people by pretending it’s our business with the false promise of our support. The only thing that matters to us about Ukraine just now is that we’re standing in the way of useful negotiations to end the conflict there and egging on various other countries in Europe to aggravate the situation.

It’s been a fine distraction from everything else that is slipping away in our own country, including the loss of liberty, the right to a livelihood, the need for legitimate meaning, the value of our money, our respect for the law, the ability to speak our minds, and our duty and obligations to each other. Our government is not interested in supporting any of that, and we might doubt that it even could anymore if it wanted to. It only wants to keep you in a state of abject thrall while it fritters away our posterity.

Saturday Matinee: The Long Kiss Goodnight

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The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Lookback/Review

Overlooked, underappreciated, Geena Davis headlining an action flick with Samuel L. Jackson as her wisecracking, foulmouthed sidekick. White girl, Black guy buddy movie. Some of us here LOVE this movie.

By Tony Sokol

Source: Den of Geek

There are rumors and rumors of rumors that a sequel to Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is in the works. I inexplicably missed the original when it came out and dismissed it as just another action flick. I was more than surprised at how prescient a movie it was at the time. The nineties was an adventurous time for filmmaking. Increasingly influenced by music videos, a lot of the art showed dark overtones, in bright colors and quick cuts. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs brought a sense of low-budget high-octane fun and breakaway banter back into the movies. He also expanded on the naturalistic acting styles in Barry Levinson’s conversational film Diner that let everyday small talk happen while allowing the plot to move along as it might. On the surface, The Long Kiss Goodnight is a fast-paced adventure movie with a quick wit, an accelerating pace, famous locations, and a female hero that performs too many impossible physical feats. Underneath it is an allegory to the growing paranoiac conspiracy theories that are now flooding into the mainstream. The movie references the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Samantha Caine’s transformation into the regrettably-named Charly Baltimore can be seen as an allusion to sleeper-agent multiple personality assassins.

1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight was the second movie in a row that director Renny Harlin made with his then-wife Geena Davis. Davis played a pirate in the previous year’s Cutthroat Island. Harlin previously directed The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Die Hard 2 which were edited simultaneously and released just a week apart. Die Hard 2 was a huge hit and Ford Fairlane starred Andrew Dice Clay.  Harlin started his career by directing Finland’s most expensive film and the slashers Prison and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The screenplay was written by action movie pioneer Shane Black who also wrote Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2, The Last Boy Scout and The Last Action Hero. Alan Silvestri composed the Original Music and the Cinematography was by Guillermo Navarro.

Geena Davis plays Samantha/Charly, the ultimate sleeper agent. Davis was probably best known as Thelma from Thelma and Louise, but had also made Dustin Hoffman stutter in Tootsie and acted in a string of movies including The Fly, Beetlejuice, A League of Their Own, Quick Change, Earth Girls are Easy and won an Oscar for Accidental Tourist. Besides being an actress, Davis is also a late-blooming Olympic archer and a member of Mensa. According to the Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci true-crime book Murder Machine, Geena Davis occasionally babysat for mobster Dominick Montiglio’s kids. Montiglio was a member of Roy DeMeo’s assassination crew. The DeMeo crew hired  sociopathic family guy Richard “The Iceman“ Kuklinski (who lived across the street of a friend of mine when I was a kid) for wet jobs and Hollywood made a movie out of The Iceman in which Geena Davis snorts coke in a cameo. Davis was nominated for a Saturn Award for her performances as Samantha/Charlie. Samuel Jackson seems to be lit by some inner fire. He brings a damaged humanity and vulnerability to the wildest of roles. He brings more than wisecracks to private detective Mitch Hennessy. He puts tangible fear and uncertainty behind the bluster.

Amnesia chick Samantha Caine thinks she is a single mother and schoolteacher living in the small, suburban town of Honesdale, Pa. who is dating a nice guy. She suffers from “focal retrograde amnesia.” She has a daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima), but she can’t remember the father. She hires Mitch Hennessy, a private detective who pulls small extortion cons, to find out who she used to be. An automobile accident activates Samantha’s “inner landscape” and she begins to remember her other personality, Charly, the woman she used to be. Originally mistaking herself for a chef, because she’s very handy with large kitchen knives, she begins to have more realizations of her past. Hennessy’s partner, Trin (played by Melina Kanakaredes, who has gone on to become a TV fixture as Dr. Sydney Hansen on Providence and as Det. Stella Bonasera on CSI: NY ), gets a major clue to her identity from a suitcase left in the attic of a boarding house. Saved from an assassination attempt by a very durable refrigerator door, Samantha takes off with Hennessy to unravel the clues and assemble a Remington rifle. They contact Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox) who tells Samantha that she never existed, that she was created as a cover identity for Charlene Elizabeth “Charly” Baltimore, a CIA assassin who disappeared eight years ago to resurface as a one of Santa’s elves on a parade float. Samantha and Hennessy take a trip to the Garden State to see her former fiancé Luke (David Morse), who turns out to be Daedalus, her last assassination assignment. Awkward. Charly kills Daedalus for reminding her who she is, grabs Hennessy and goes after her old CIA boss Leland Perkins (Patrick Malahide) who’s now working with an old nemesis from PsyOps Timothy (Craig Bierko), who is probably Caitlin’s daddy, to do a fund raiser for the CIA. No, they’re not gonna bake cookies. They’re going to tease conspiracy theorists for years:

Hennessy:

Fund raiser?

Perkins:

1993, World Trade Center bombing, remember? During the trial one of the bombers claimed the CIA had advanced knowledge; the diplomat who issued the terrorists visa was CIA, it’s not unthinkable they paved the way for the bombing, purely to justify a budget increase.”

Hennessy:

You’re telling me that you’re gonna fake some terrorist thing just to scare some money outta congress?

Perkins:

Well unfortunately Mr. Hennessy I have no idea how to fake killing 4,000 people, so we’re just going to have to do it for real. Oh, blame it on the Muslims naturally, then I’ll get my funding.

Sound familiar? It should, dozens of 9-11 references are supposedly found in movies and TV shows (Short-lived X-File spinoff Lone Gunmen’s pilot was about a thwarted World Trade Center bombing) made before 2001. There is a movement of people who believe that Hollywood power brokers knew all about it.

Geena Davis does a magnificent job playing the dual roles of Samantha and Charly. Although we are led to believe that Charly is the real person that she used to be, there are enough hints that she may be a Delta programmed assassin with multiple personalities. This might explain her enhanced abilities. Charly’s almost a superhero, she can grab a gun from a burning man while in free-fall and shoot a target dead in the eye, she can shoot open a block of ice for a soft landing with an automatic weapon, she can outrun an incendiary bomb, she’s better than Xena. She has an epiphany while standing naked in front of a mirror. A lot of people who say they are MK Ultra mind control survivors use mirror imagery. She switches between alters, from gleefully skewering a tomato into a wall with a carving knife, because “chefs do that” to threatening her kid to skate, “Life is pain, get used to it.” We learn that Charly has been around the intelligence community from the time she was a kid, her father was in the Irish military. Recruited into spy work in spite of her violent tendencies, Charly sometimes also changes into a sex kitten personality, another theme from MK Ultra conspiracy threads.

The Long Kiss Goodnight was prescient about quite a few things besides the growing trend to female action heroes. For every “the last time I got blown candy bars cost a nickel” there is a subtle nod to mind-blowing paranoid possibilities. This is a conspiracy movie posing as an adventure flick.

Watch The Long Kiss Goodnight on Pluto TV here: https://pluto.tv/en/on-demand/movies/the-long-kiss-goodnight-1996-1-1?utm_medium=textsearch&utm_source=google

Einstein and Freud’s ‘Why War?’ Revisited: Why Anti-War Efforts Go Nowhere

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By Robert J. Burrowes

In 1932, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein exchanged letters, later published under the title ‘Why War?’ See ‘Why War? An exchange of letters between Freud and Einstein’.

However, whatever insight these two giants of an earlier era brought to our understanding of war, the reality is that a great deal has been learned since they corresponded.

Nevertheless, since the emergence of an identifiable, organized anti-war movement during World War I which has grown to include a diverse range of activists and organizations from across the political spectrum, as well as peace and conflict resolution scholars from various disciplines, there is little evidence that this movement, or any of the many organizations within it, has been learning from its failures by systematically undertaking or commissioning further research to understand the phenomenon of war more completely and then devising a strategy to end it based on that learning.

Hence, during its existence for more than 100 years, the organized anti-war movement – and the subsequently developed peace movement with its broader agenda – has had minimal impact in preventing or halting particular military conflicts, including wars, and zero impact in ending war generally, as the record testifies.

And so, even today, war continues in several countries in West Asia (the Middle East), Africa, elsewhere and, more recently, in Ukraine with the antiwar movement again demonstrating its ineffectiveness and, in the case of Ukraine, failing to comprehend the deeper agenda behind what is taking place in that country. See ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’.

Of course, while an utterly inadequate analysis of what, fundamentally, is driving war is the critical foundation of the anti-war movement’s problems, it is still just one of the substantial range of problems it faces, some of which derive from this flawed analysis but others which a better analysis would expose. These include, for example, an understanding of why the fear of most of those within the anti-war movement is preventing the movement from mustering the commitment and courage that will be necessary if we are to undertake the many actions necessary to end war. In essence, fear makes most participants in the movement happy to complain about war but not take action themselves (or take action that has zero or minimal impact).

As Daniel Berrigan noted in his 1969 book No Bars to Manhood: ‘the waging of war, by its nature, is total – but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.’

This cowardice means that a large proportion of the anti-war movement contents itself with a range of powerless measures – usually extending no further than signing petitions, issuing lameduck ideologically-oriented statements, writing articles, organizing conferences, issuing calls for negotiations or appeals to politicians – all invariably devoid of emotional and geopolitical reality as well as realistic measures to avert/halt the latest war.

This might include advocacy of measures, such as those developed under the guise of international humanitarian law, in relation to ‘outlawing war’ or outlawing particular weapons systems, despite the obvious observation that these legal constraints are routinely violated with impunity by any military power, starting with the United States, or non-state actor that is unconstrained by questions of legality.

Beyond this, ‘action’, when it is taken, is usually confined to conducting (notoriously ineffective) street protests or employing other tactics devoid of strategic impact in the context (of ending war). As former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once noted about a massive anti-war demonstration: ‘Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.’ See Alexander Haig. As a four-star general, Haig, not regarded as the most intelligent Secretary of State in US history, certainly understood that tactical choice is a question of strategy. Most activists have no idea.

So if we are to end war as a phenomenon in human affairs, or even meaningfully attempt to prevent or end a particular war, we need to do a number of things. Most fundamentally, we must start with a sound understanding of what causes violence to begin with because war does not emerge from a vacuum. War, when all is considered, is just another manifestation of violence, like everything from violence against women to economic exploitation to environmental destruction.

And if we are not able or willing to investigate and understand what is causing violence, and address this fundamental cause as part of our strategy, then our other efforts to end the manifestations of violence, including war, must all be in vain. Again, as the record readily testifies.

What Causes Violence?

So what is the cause of violence? Here is what 41 years (1966-2007) of concerted effort taught me.

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The political leaders who decide to wage war, the military leaders who plan and conduct it, as well as the soldiers, sailors and aircraft personnel who fight war each suffered violence as a child. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The neo-Nazi suffered violence as a child. The individual who inflicts violence on his (or her) partner suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist or religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child. The individual who overconsumes, or even consumes certain products and/or otherwise destroys the biosphere, suffered violence as a child.

So let me illustrate this point, in a very simplified way, by briefly explaining the parenting experience of a neo-Nazi. This individual has been terrorized by their parents and/or other significant adults in their life into projecting their fear onto particular groups of human beings and into believing that violence is a morally correct and superior way of dealing with these ‘different’ people. But for a much fuller and more nuanced explanation of this point, see the sections headed ‘The Emotional Profile of Archetype Perpetrators of Violence’ and ‘The Spectrum of the Violent Personality’ in ‘Why Violence?’

If we want to end violence in all of its manifestations, structural and otherwise, locally and globally, then we must finally end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an additional incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand – by nuclear war or other means – is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behaviour is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to ‘socialize’ children to ‘fit into’ their society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviours in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than this and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (for example, by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (for example, by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is simply one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’ and ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? As mentioned above, we do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen (that is, one who pays their taxes, including those for war, and votes and/or lobbies politicians rather than acting powerfully themSelf).

The bottom line is simple: As parents, teachers, religious figures and adults generally, we want the child to be obedient to our commands, and not powerfully able to act in accord with their own Self-will. And we achieve this outcome by terrorizing the child into doing what we want rather than nurturing the child’s innate capacity to listen, deeply, to themSelf in order to follow their own will.

Moreover, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themSelf, other people and the state of the world – with the bulk of this information mediated by elite agents including education systems, the entertainment industry and the corporate media – the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information, no matter how truthful, out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why some people are ‘climate deniers’, most people do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe and even those people who do take action usually do so ineffectively. See ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’

But the same can be said for those working to end war – see ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ – end the nuclear weapons race or engage in other struggles, including liberation struggles, that are vital parts of the global struggle to create a more peaceful, just and sustainable human culture. See ‘Why Activists Fail’.

And to briefly put this issue in the current global context, the vast bulk of the human population, including most of those individuals whom society would regard as ‘highly intelligent’, has been readily terrorized into believing that they are threatened by a pathogenic virus (labeled ‘SARS-CoV-2’) when there is no documented, scientific proof that such an entity as a pathogenic virus even exists – see ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong – and certainly no documented scientific proof that a virus labeled SARS-CoV-2 exists. See ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’ and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’. And for an account of researcher Christine Massey’s fruitless search over the course of more than a year to find evidence of an isolated virus, via Freedom of Information requests to health/science institutions all over the world, see ‘177 health/science institutions globally all failed to cite even 1 record of “SARS-COV-2” purification, by anyone, anywhere, ever’.

Despite this, the vast bulk of the human population has been terrorized into accepting a series of medical intrusions (including lockdowns, PCR tests, mask-wearing and gene-altering injectables) when, in fact, there is no documented, scientific proof that (assuming there was a ‘pathogenic virus’) lockdowns, PCR tests, mask-wearing or ‘vaccines’ even ‘work’ and/or extensive documentation of their harm. See, for example, ‘And How Are the Children? Lockdowns, Massive Fear, Deaths from Suicides and Drug Abuse’, ‘The WHO Confirms that the Covid-19 PCR Test is Flawed: Estimates of “Positive Cases” are Meaningless. The Lockdown Has No Scientific Basis’, ‘Conclusion Regarding Masks: They Do Not Work’, ‘Masks “don’t work,” are damaging health and are being used to control population: Doctors panel’, ‘The Truth about the Covid-19 Vaccine’, ‘A Final Warning to Humanity’, ‘COVID Shots to “Decimate World Population,” Warns Dr. Bhakdi’ and ‘20 Facts about Vaccination Your Doctor Forgot To Tell You’.

And because the fear generated by the elite-driven ‘virus’/injectable narrative has been so debilitating and thus engendered a high level of obedience by the population at large, it is a rare individual who has investigated both the shortcomings in this narrative and the horrific agenda that this narrative is concealing, let alone identified a powerful strategy to resist it. See ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’.

So, to return to the focus of this article, let me briefly reiterate this vital point: The essence of what human beings call ‘socialization’ is the process by which each child is terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning or their learning capacity is seriously diminished. The multifaceted violence inflicted throughout childhood and adolescence ensures that the adult who emerges is suppressing awareness of an enormous amount of fear, pain, sadness and anger (among many other feelings) and must live in delusion to remain unaware of these suppressed feelings. This ensures that, as part of their delusion, the individual develops a strong sense that what they are doing already is functional and working (no matter how dysfunctional and ineffective it may actually be) while not investigating the existence of evidence that might contradict their delusion and/or unconsciously suppressing awareness of any evidence they come across that does contradict it. They do this because, unconsciously, people learn to identify obedience with ‘functional and working’ (because they do not get punished for being obedient). See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’, ‘Do We Want School or Education?’, ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and ‘Human Intelligence or Human Awareness?’

Just one critically important outcome of this terrorization process is that a significant proportion of the human population is effectively insane, and this certainly includes the Global Elite and those primary elite agents on which it relies to generate and maintain wars. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Another critically important outcome of this terrorization process is that the international conflict resolution architecture – which is essentially a legal framework – does not take emotional factors into account. Hence it is not capable of resolving conflicts in any meaningful way. This is why negotiations often go nowhere, particularly in a timeframe that would avert adverse outcomes. And why ‘agreements’ that are reached are utterly superficial. The fundamental drivers of the conflict – invariably including suppressed terror, self-hatred and anger which are often unconsciously projected at the other party – are never addressed and will continue to manifest as violence in various forms, even if military violence is ended in a particular context. See ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’.

So if we want a powerfully effective anti-war movement (or peace movement, environmental movement, social justice movement….) then we need Self-aware individuals who can think, plan and act powerfully as part of strategically-oriented organizations to achieve ambitious longer-term goals. Such as ending the institution of war.

Anything less will fail. Again, as the record demonstrates.

So What Can We Do?

Ending war is possible. But it will take a courageous, sophisticated, strategic effort, given how deeply violence is embedded into the human ‘socialization’ process which makes war just one of the many approved violent behaviours in which adults are expected and encouraged to participate, beginning with paying taxes to finance it.

So while it is possible to end war, this won’t be happening any time soon.

And it can’t happen until we commit ourselves to eliminating violence against children so that human society creates adults who are psychologically whole and powerfully able to participate in conflict without resorting to violence to ‘resolve’ it.

Nevertheless, in parallel with efforts to eliminate violence against children, those powerful enough can also participate in a comprehensive strategy to end war as explained on the ‘Nonviolent Strategy’ website, starting with this list of ‘Strategic Goals to End War’. This is extrapolated from a book which explained why a strategy of nonviolent defense, understood and implemented by sufficient committed and organized individuals, is strategically superior to any military strategy. See The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

Or, if you want to participate in a strategy to end a particular war, such as that in Ukraine, particularly given the possibility of it morphing into a longer term insurgency – see ‘Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda’ – you can read how to do so here: Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

But, as explained above, precisely because of their socialization experience during childhood, most of those who would identify as ‘anti-war’ are simply too frightened to act powerfully in resisting it. Hence, war will continue until we address its root cause: violence against children.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com