Tag Archives: activism

THE MADNESS OF WAR

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By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

It is essential to constantly remind ourselves, that war, apart from a very few exceptions, is a symptom of madness. Yet war is a disease which is largely taken for granted; considered ‘normal’ and unless it involves a large swathe of humanity, ignored. How did we allow ourselves to be trapped by such insanity?

In 2017, wars are as prevalent as ever. They are being manifest in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, and in a lesser form, in almost all countries of the World. They are the result of a failure to recognize that killing another is actually killing one’s self. A failure to grasp that humanity is a collective made up of millions of individuals, all of whom share a common ancestry and, on a subconscious plain, a common aspiration and destiny.

There is no victory in war. War is an admission of defeat. When humans resort to mass killing of each other we see an expression of failure, never success. Not so long ago war was glorified and, for the victor, held up as an expression of supreme national pride. In fact, such an attitude was predominant in the species for thousands of years.

However two World Wars put an end to the hubris. The levels of destruction were so great and so many millions died brutal and ugly deaths, that a kind of ‘war weariness’ set-in amongst the survivors, and a new sense of the futility of it all became integrated into societies which had undergone the experience. The world looked like it might have learned its lesson; people had pounded each other, and the natural environment, into a sickening pulp, and there was no glorious aftermath. Just a sense of what ‘peace’ could actually mean.

There were, and are, still some who find war ‘exciting’, whose own lives are too dull and routine to find any thrill in the act of daily living. They look-on at wars in foreign territories as extensions of their own angst and frustrations. Such individuals find temporary comfort in watching others die.

This condition is more prevalent than many might realize; it is symptomatic of a world crushed by meaningless routine and managed by those lacking any manifest vision of something more deeply fulfilling to awaken starved imaginations.

Of course, a history of war will reveal that whole civilizations were born and dissolved via victory and defeat on the battlefield. It was believed that these blood baths were a price worth paying for the great accumulation of national wealth which followed them, if one was on the winning side. It is sobering to reflect that much of the fine architecture of old Europe is a result of plundered wealth.

War is made no less destructive by the fact that it can now be carried out by people sitting in air-conditioned ‘cockpits’ in Houston. People trained to kill ‘at a distance’. People whose chance of being themselves attacked by those they target, being pretty much nil. This type of killing is one step away from the ‘robotic soldier’, the envisioned battle field of the future and a direct of extension of the war games kids (and adults) play on their electronic gizmos.

But look, it’s still the same underlying disease. It’s still the fascination with the idea of somehow ‘coming out on top’ and having it over ‘an inferior’. It’s still reveling in destruction, on all planes of planetary life.

Children play war games. I used to play ‘Cowboys and Indians’. I was indoctrinated into ‘war thinking’ from a very early age. It was just after World War Two, and life in Britain was steeped in stories of heroism carried out by ‘our boys’ against the Nazis. Toy soldier armies ranged against each other across the sitting room floor as parents looked on with quiet acceptance. We soon graduated on to ‘cap guns’ and staged mock battles around the garden bushes and trees.

But nobody got killed in these ‘war games’ and the ground wasn’t turned into a sea of craters and toxic mud by our childhood antics. Other matters eventually attracted our curiosity and interest, and the guns and bows and arrows were dumped, unlikely to be seen again.

If mankind would only grow up, the same situation would repeat around the world. Adult individuals, blessed with a little responsibility and the slimmest glimmer of wisdom, would ‘move on’ to areas of interest that expressed an eagerness to support the planet, and not destroy it. A wish to explore new horizons of consciousness, and not to regress into thoughtless thuggery. A desire to meet and enjoy the company of other races and nationalities, and not to put a gun to their heads.

How can this madness have gone on so long? How can war still ‘be taken for granted’ in 2017?

Even those who argue vociferously for cutting back excessive CO2 emissions on the planet, don’t call for an end to war and ‘war games’ that are responsible for a large part of these emissions. They fail to realize that here is to be found the single largest transmission of toxic CO2 when set against any other global activity. I’m including a brief summary of the US position in 2013, just to illustrate the point:

“According to its own study, in 2013 the Pentagon consumed fuel equivalent to 90,000,000 barrels of crude oil. This amounts to 80% of the total fuel usage by the federal government. If burned as jet fuel it produces about 38,700,000 metric tons of CO2. And the Pentagon’s figures do not include carbon produced by the thousands of bombs dropped in 2013, or the fires that burned after the jets and drones departed. ” (Counter Punch).

Most environmentalists and climate change campaigners also ‘take war for granted’, it seems. It has been etched into our bones by an endless indoctrination process. A process whose symptoms can also be found in the way we are urged to be ‘aggressive’ and ‘competitive’ in order to make progress within the demands of the status quo. How much of what is called ‘education’ is about bringing out our creative potential instead of our aggressive potential? And how much is about cramming us with the means to ‘succeed’ in the mostly cut throat world of business and indeed, almost all professions?

We see the symptoms of aggression in daily life, and fail to question it. Is it any wonder that we fail to question war?

War is the most favored tool of the controlling powers. It supplies the coffers of the military industrial complex with an endless demand for production of weapons. The state then gets the pay-off and looks for another war to keep the cycle of death going. It is also a valuable diversionary tool for distracting the general public, while unpopular and controversial issues are pushed through the system, with only a few noticing.

Of course a great prize for warmongers in general, is anticipation of the breaking out of mother of all wars. And indeed, the ever looming threat of genocide never seems far off at the hands of those who play with power the way children play with their toy guns and swords, but without any of the child’s creativity. Today, in the USA in particular, megalomania has become wedded with a sort of Russian Roulette approach to who might present the next useful target for a bombing run or drone attack.

Witness how high the stakes get set in this fiendish game. Witness the Russian Federation and President Putin being ever further provoked by the West to take an aggressive step that could trigger a mega war scenario. The vicious taunting, without a shred of evidence to give it credence, is a mark of the madness which all too often grips those in power. Those who are determined to diminish all of life to a poisoned arrow of fabricated fear, which, if ever launched, would take all of humanity with it.

Let us be sure to keep a close eye on those whom we elect to administer our countries. The intoxication which comes with power is a very dangerous addiction, particularly when the play things at such people’s disposal are weapons of mass destruction. We need, more than ever, to be able to recognize the symptoms of megalomania and not confuse it with ‘strong leadership’. It is a major weakness in the delivery of what is called democracy, that so many people are still so easily fooled by those ‘standing for election’.

We are being pushed by ‘anti-life’ forces, some of whose origins are less than human, to see the planet and its people as expendable. To accept lies, deception and crude power-play as something akin to ‘normal’. To feel that it is not in our powers to bring deep change to a washed-out and degraded status quo. To believe that war is an ‘acceptable’ way of shifting around the totems of power.

It’s time we not only woke up, but got out of bed too. The hour is late, and this should add a significant degree of urgency to our endeavors. Mankind is blessed with deep powers of positive potential and these powers are far greater than the force which drives the war mongering anti-life minority. We are close to a tipping point in the growth of conscious awareness amongst caring human beings.

The key will be to channel this awareness into taking measures to regain control of our destinies.

To rid this world of those who hold its fate in their numb, insensitive hands. To act in unison and to defy all efforts to divide and conquer our growing sense of purpose and endeavor.

We can and we will, put an end to the madness of war. We must not wait for war to put an end to us.

 

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK Organic farming, a writer, actor, social entrepreneur and international activist. During the 1970’s he worked in experimental theatre as actor and assistant director, co-founding the The Institute for Creative Development, in Belgium, teaching holistic thinking and dramatic art. In the 1980’s he returned to the UK to take over the family farm and convert it to an organic system. His experience as a leader in reviving rural economies throughout the 1990’s, led him to be invited to join the advisory board of the South East of England Development Agency, and the Country Land Owners Association. He also served on the Oxfordshire Economic Partnership and was founder-chairman of The Association of Rural Businesses in Oxfordshire. In 2,000 he led an innovative project to revive regionally important market towns as centres of vibrant local activity and hubs for rejuvenated local food initiatives.

Julian is a prolific writer and broadcaster, his articles appear in a wide diversity of journals and on-line sites. Visit www.julianrose.info to find out about Julian’s highly diverse life and acclaimed books ‘Changing Course for Life’ and ‘In Defence of Life’.

The Unifying Force of War Abolition

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By David Swanson

Source: Let’s Try Democracy

Remarks at United National Antiwar Coalition in Richmond, Virginia, on June 18, 2017.

It’s not unusual for an activist, focused on one of the millions of worthy causes out there, to try to recruit other activists to that particular cause. That’s not exactly what I want to do. For one thing, if we are going to succeed we are going to have to recruit millions of new people into activism who are not now active at all.

Of course I do favor types of activism that eliminate the need for more activism, such as campaigns to make voter registration automatic or to index the minimum wage to the cost of living. But for the most part I want everyone to keep doing what inspires them. Only, I think I know a way to shift our emphases and unite out movements, a way that doesn’t usually occur to us.

It’s not unusual for an activist to think that their particular field is the unifying top priority.

For example:

If we don’t get the money out of politics how can we enact or enforce any laws not favored by money? We’ve legalized bribery for godsake! What else matters until we fix that?

Or:

If we don’t create credible democratic independent media, we can’t communicate. Door knocking can’t defeat television. We only know that Cindy Sheehan went to Crawford or Occupyers went to Wall Street because corporate television chose to tell us. Why have elections if we can’t tell the truth about the candidates?

Or:

Excuse me, the earth is cooking. Our species and many others are losing their habitats. If it’s not already too late, now is the time to decide whether we will have great grandchildren at all. If we don’t have any, what will it matter what kind of elections or television networks they have?

One can go on and on in this vein, as well as in claiming that one societal evil precedes and causes another. Racism or militarism or extreme materialism is the disease and the others are the symptoms.

All of this is also not exactly what I want to do. I want us to work on everything and use every means of unifying. I want us to recognize how each problem contributes to others and vice versa. Hungry scared people can’t end climate change. A culture that puts a trillion dollars a year into mass-killing of distant dark-skinned people can’t build schools or end racism. Unless we redistribute wealth, we cannot redistribute power. We can’t create media unless we have something important to say. We can’t protect the earth’s climate while steadfastly ignoring the top consumer of petroleum on earth because criticizing the military would be inappropriate. But we will go on ignoring it if we don’t create good media. We have to do it all, and there are various ways in which we can become more united, more strategic, and potentially more effective.

The way that I think we don’t pay enough attention to lies in developing a focus on complete and total war abolition, elimination of all weapons and militaries, all bases, all aircraft carriers, missiles, armed drones, generals, colonels, and if necessary all senators from Arizona.

Why war abolition? I’ll give you 10 reasons.

  1. It actually makes sense. The reasonable position of opposing some wars and cheering for others, but cheering for the troops even in the bad wars doesn’t attract a lot of energy because it doesn’t make any sense. Jeremy Corbyn just won votes by pointing out that wars generate terrorism, they are counter-productive on their own terms, endangering us rather than protecting us. They need to be replaced with diplomacy, aid, cooperation, the rule of law, the tools of nonviolence, the skills of de-escalation of conflict. Claiming that wars are sort of good but shouldn’t be overdone makes no sense at all — what is the point of them if not to win them? And if wars make murder OK, why is torture so unacceptable? And if bombs dropped by piloted planes are OK, what’s wrong with drones? And if Anthrax is barbaric, why are White Phosphrous and Napalm civilized? None of it makes any sense, which is one reason the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. You know how to properly love the troops, end all war and give them life options that don’t make them want to kill themselves.
  2. Nuclear apocalypse is a growing danger on a par with climate chaos and will continue to grow unless war abolition succeeds.
  3. The biggest destroyer of water, air, land, and atmosphere that we have is militarism. It’s war or planet. Time to choose.
  4. War kills first and foremost by removing resources from where they are needed, including from famines and disease epidemics created by war. Any activism that seeks funding for any human or environmental needs has to look to ending war. It is where all the money is, more money every single year than could be taken once and only once from the billionaires.
  5. War creates secrecy, surveillance, classification of public business, warrantless spying on activists, patriotic lying, and illegal actions by secret agencies.
  6. War militarizes local police, making the public into an enemy.
  7. War fuels, just as it is fueled by, racism, sexism, bigotry, hatred, and domestic violence. It teaches people to solve problems by shooting guns.
  8. War divides humanity at a time when we must unite on major projects if we are to survive or prosper.
  9. A movement to abolish all war, all weapons, and all atrocities that flow out of war can unite opponents of the crimes of one government or group with the opponents of the crimes of another. Without equating all crimes with each other, we can unite as opponents of war rather than of each other.
  10. War is the primary thing our society does, it sucks down the majority of federal discretionary spending, its promotion permeates our culture. It is the very foundation of the belief that ends can justify evil means. Taking on the myths that sell us war as necessary or inevitable or glorious is an ideal way of opening our minds to rethinking what we’re doing on this little planet.

So let’s not work for an environmentally sensitive military into which women have the equal right to be drafted against their will. Let’s not oppose the weapons that are wasteful or don’t kill well enough. Let’s build a broad multi-issue movement in which one of the unifying factors is the cause of eliminating in its entirety the institution of organized mass murder.

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

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On negotiating the false idols of neoliberal self-care

By Laurie Penny

Source: The Baffler

Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.

Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

There is an obvious political dimension to the claim that wellbeing, with the right attitude, can be produced spontaneously. Months after being elected leader of the most right-wing government in recent British history, yogurt-featured erstwhile PR man David Cameron launched an ill-fated “happiness agenda.” The scheme may have been better received if the former prime minister were not simultaneously engaged in decimating health care, welfare, and higher education—the very social structures that make life manageable for ordinary British people. As part of Cameron’s changes to the welfare system, unemployment was rebranded as a psychological disorder. According to a study in the Medical Humanities journal, in the teeth of the longest and deepest recession in living memory, the jobless were encouraged to treat their “psychological resistance” to work by way of obligatory courses that encouraged them to adopt a jollier attitude toward their own immiseration. They were harangued with motivational text messages telling them to “smile at life” and that “success is the only option.”

This mode of coercion has been adopted by employers, too, as Cederström and Spicer note. Zero-hour-contract laborers in an Amazon warehouse, “although they are in a precarious situation . . . are required to hide these feelings and project a confident, upbeat, employable self.” All of which begs the question: Who exactly are we being well for?

The well-being ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”

The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.

Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:

The biggest barrier to achieving the success you have defined for your life is never anyone else or the circumstances you encounter. Your biggest barrier is almost always you. . . . Dr Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics [ETA: sounds legit to me!], put it best when he said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can change your beliefs.

This, of course, is a cyclopean lie—but it’s a seductive one nonetheless. It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of well-being and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.

With the language of self-care and well-being almost entirely colonized by the political right, it is not surprising that progressives, liberals, and left-wing groups have begun to fetishize a species of abject hopelessness. Positive thinking has become deeply unfashionable. The American punk kids I know describe it, disparagingly, as “posi.” The British ones, of course, describe it as “American.” Whatever you call it, it feels a lot like giving in.

In a scintillating essay at Open Democracy, activist Chloe King writes that

changing your attitude is not going to change or help to dismantle structural injustice and a failed and unsustainable economic model which serves only the elite rich of this world, and exploits the rest of us, particularly the working class and those living in poverty. As far as I am concerned positive thinking will fucking ruin your life. “Just think positive” is a precursor to “it gets better,” and the hard reality is it is only going to get much, much worse for our most vulnerable.

There is truth here. What is also true, however, is that the young people I know who are, in general, the very worst at taking basic care of themselves as individuals—the people whose problem is not that they don’t drink enough asparagus water, but that they don’t drink enough of anything that isn’t day-old wine from a foil bag—are those who went through the student and Occupy uprisings of 2010–2012 and experienced, briefly, what it meant to live a different sort of life. What it meant to be part of a community with common goals of which mutual aid and support were not the least. What it meant to experience that sudden, brief respite from individual striving and build a prefigurative society together. The lonely work of taking basic care of yourself as you wait for the world to change is a poor substitute. When you’re washed up and burned out from putting your body on the line to fight the state, it’s especially galling to be told to share a smile and eat more whole grains.

When modernity teaches us to loathe ourselves and then sells us quick fixes for despair, we can be forgiven for balking at the cash register. Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery. Which is better? The question is not rhetorical. On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.

Some of the left critique of self-care as a neoliberal conspiracy has to do with dismissing the work that women and queer people do to survive. “I have heard feminism be dismissed as a form of self-indulgence,” writes Professor Sara Ahmed of Goldsmiths, University of London. So have I. I’ve heard men on the left write off anti-sexist, anti-racist politics as hopelessly individualistic, whilst also refusing to do the basic work of self-care and mutual care that keeps hope alive and health possible, because that work is women’s work, undignified in comparison to watching your life fall apart while you wait for the revolution or for some girl to pick up the pieces, whichever comes first.

The left has a special talent for counterproductive, theory-enabled wallowing. “Neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neo-liberalism,” writes Ahmed. “When feminist, queer, and anti-racist work that involves sharing our feelings, our hurt and grief, recognizing that power gets right to the bone, is called neo-liberalism, we have to hear what is not being heard. . . . A world against you can be experienced as your body turning against you. You might be worn down, worn out, by what you are required to take in.”

It is at this point that I confess to you that I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system. Overpriced charcoal health drinks aren’t good for liberating anything except your wallet and your colon in short succession, but walks in the park are free, so I occasionally go out in the sunshine and try to soak up a bit of Vitamin D without worrying about skin cancer, melting ice-caps, and millions of people drowning in Bangladesh. I no longer subsist entirely on chicken nuggets, cigarettes, and spite. I sometimes take a day off, because it became apparent that the revolution was not being driven any faster by my being sick and sad all the time. Late Capitalism is as good an excuse of any for not getting out of bed, but huddling under the covers worrying about Donald Trump is a very inefficient way of sticking it to the man.

The problem with self-love as we currently understand it is in our view of love itself, defined, too simply and too often, as an extraordinary feeling that we respond to with hearts and flowers and fantasy, ritual consumption and affectless passion. Modernity would have us mooning after ourselves like heartsick, slightly creepy teenagers, taking selfies and telling ourselves how special and perfect we are. This is not real self-love, no more than a catcaller loves the woman whose backside he’s loudly admiring in the street.

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

The broader left could learn a great deal from the queer community, which has long taken the attitude that caring for oneself and one’s friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle—in many ways, it is the struggle. Writer and trans icon Kate Bornstein’s rule number one is “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.” It’s more than likely that one of the reasons that the trans and queer communities continue to make such gains in culture, despite a violent backlash, is the broad recognition that self-care, mutual aid, and gentle support can be tools of resistance, too. After the Orlando massacre, LGBTQ people across the world started posting selfies under the hashtag #queerselflove. In the midst of the horror, the public mourning, and the fear, queer people of all ages and backgrounds across the world engaged in some light-hearted celebration of ourselves, of one another.

The ideology of wellbeing may be exploitative, and the tendency of the left to fetishize despair is understandable, but it is not acceptable—and if we waste energy hating ourselves, nothing’s ever going to change. If hope is too hard to manage, the least we can do is take basic care of ourselves. On my greyest days, I remind myself of the words of the poet and activist Audre Lorde, who knew a thing or two about survival in an inhuman world, and wrote that self care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

A dystopia in real time

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By Dave Lefcourt

Source: OpEdNews.com

Let’s come straight out with it, to the US government, We the People are the enemy.

If you’ve read John W. Whitehead [1] regularly you’re already aware of that.

The tell-tale sign: surveillance camera’s seemingly everywhere. On most street intersections, photo enforced streets, roads by all schools, airports, railway stations, toll roads and all commercial stores.

Then there’s the ubiquitous, “If you see something, say something” heard in Metro subway stations, airports and railway stations. It’s portrayed as a necessary given for our “safety and protection” make us fearful of would be terrorists and other bad guys out to harm us.

But really ALL meant for the authorities to keep close tabs on us everywhere. Combined with electronic surveillance of our cell phones and computers-whether on or off-and the NSA pretty much has us under its constant surveillance.

Of course it’s all against the 4th Amendments strictures against “unreasonable searches and seizures” and without “probable cause” making it all illegal. Yet most Americans apparently don’t care taking the foolish “I haven’t done anything wrong so why worry about it” mantra.

It appears the public has been so propagandized and indoctrinated, they’ve accepted these illegal surveillance intrusions into their everyday lives.

But think about it: If the public absolutely objected to their governments spying on them these illegal intrusions could be severely curtailed, limited only to court ordered warrants for specific instances of suspected criminal activities-as legally specified in the Constitution.

The reason the government has become so paranoid of the people? They know we’re the many and they’re the few and if our police and military realized they were protecting and defending the indefensible, against the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, the party would all be over.

And that necessary “revolution” returning the government to and for the people could soon be realized.

Then all our illegal wars and occupations ended, the military downsized to defend only against an imminent attack, the billions spent on unnecessary defense industry weaponry eliminated, nuclear weapons eliminated and peace in the world realized.

So our government knows its biggest enemy is its own people, not terrorists, Russia, China, Iran or North Korea.

It’s us, you and me they’re really afraid of. That’s why they take the measures they do. Why they infiltrate peaceful protests and demonstrations with agent provocateurs who initiate violence giving the authorities the pretext to interfere and shut it down. It’s how “Occupy” was shut down in 2011 with government authorities acting in coordination nationwide.

It’s why the National Guard was called out to intervene in the summer of 2014 after police shot an unarmed Michael Brown in the streets of Ferguson, MO. when citizen protests erupted.

Now protests at political conventions are cordoned off far from the convention sites fearing a repeat of the protests and demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention.

It’s also why the military draft was eliminated specifically to get a compliant, all volunteer army of draft age men and women who were a significant part of those 1968 protests.

All governments propagandize and indoctrinate its people. In the US it starts with standing to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” in our schools, the standing for the “Star Spangled Banner”, saluting the flag, belief in our “supposed” free elections, extolling the military as our “heroes”, the Navy a “force for good”, military flyovers at professional athletic events, spotlighting service men and women in the stands eliciting a standing ovation, playing “America the Beautiful” during the 7th inning stretch.

It’s all part of the indoctrination process.

When this past season professional quarterback Colin Kaepernick was ostracized refusing to stand for the national anthem before an NFL game he was condemned in the MSM as un-American, ungrateful and a traitor to his country. Though what he did was not illegal and protected under the Constitution.

Standing for and singing the national anthem is voluntary and not required. But long standing tradition has made it “appear” as required behavior.

It’s hard to know whether Americans are the most propagandized people ever. We certainly are obedient and compliant people accepting illegal government intrusions and generally accepting the governments explanations (propaganda?) of all significant national and international incidents.

It’s almost certain the government knows with a population generally compliant to its strictures it can and will do anything with impunity knowing it will not be held accountable for its actions.

That’s why “official” Washington represents the most dangerous, rogue state entity in the world and seen by most people worldwide as the primary threat to peace in the world.

Yet to most Americans we’re the beacon on the hill embracing freedom and democracy.

In America “official” lies have been taken on a whole new meaning, become the natural order of things; a dystopia in real time.

[1] John W. Whitehead, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State”

Truth or Delusion?

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By Robert J. Burrowes

One inevitable outcome of the phenomenal violence we all suffer as
children is that most of us live in a state of delusion throughout our
lives. This makes it extraordinarily difficult for accurate information,
including vital information about the endangered state of our world and
how to respond appropriately, to penetrate the typical human mind.

‘Phenomenal violence?’ you might ask. ‘All of us?’ you wonder. Yes,
although, tragically, most of this violence goes unrecognised because it
is not usually identified as such. For most people, it is a
straightforward task to identify the ‘visible’ violence that they have
suffered and, perhaps, still suffer. However, virtually no-one is able
to identify the profoundly more damaging impact of the ‘invisible’ and
‘utterly invisible’ violence that is inflicted on us mercilessly from
the day we are born.

So what is this ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence?

‘Invisible’ violence is the ‘little things’ that adults do to children
every day, partly because they are just ‘too busy’. For example, when
adults 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 adults do not let a child say
what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops
communication and behavioural dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to
meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are
genetically programmed to do).

When adults blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate,
taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize
with and/or judge a child, they 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,
parents, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively
interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioural
responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly
invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioural
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 (e.g. by screaming at them when
they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behaviour that
is generated by their feelings (e.g. 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. In brief,
this means that the child now lives in a state of delusion. And because
this state was caused by terrorizing the child, the child is unable to
perceive the series of delusions in which they now live.

Moreover, unless the child (or, later, adult) consciously feels their
fear and terror, it will be extraordinarily difficult for them to
perceive anything beyond the delusions that they acquired during
childhood. This is simply because the various elements of the child’s
delusional state (the ‘values’, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, biases)
were the ones approved by the key adults – parents, teachers, religious
figures – in the child’s life.

Needless to say, living in a delusional state has many outcomes that are
disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the
individual will now behave on the basis of their delusions rather than
in response to an accurate assessment of all available information
through appropriate sensory, emotional, intellectual and conscientious
scrutiny. For a full explanation of this process, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

In essence then, the typical human being lives in a delusional state and
this state is held in place by enormous, but unconscious, terror: the
unfelt and hence unreleased childhood terror of being endlessly
threatened and punished (for not complying with parental or other adult
‘authority’ throughout childhood).

And if you have ever tried to persuade someone, by argument of an
intellectual nature, that a belief they hold is inaccurate and wondered
why you couldn’t get anywhere, it is because you have run into their
unconscious terror. And sheer terror beats the best argument in the
world ‘hands down’.

So when you listen to people like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, or
ponder those politicians and military generals who conduct endless wars,
or watch those people on the street protesting against Muslims and
refugees, or watch police beating up another indigenous or black person,
or hear someone else deny the climate science, remember that you are
witness to a person or people living in a terrified and delusional state
that prevents them from perceiving and responding intelligently to
reality. And that, in the case of political and corporate leaders, they
only have the support to do what they do because a great many other
delusional individuals (including voters and employees) enable them.

Equally importantly, however, it is also necessary to recognise that a
delusional state afflicts many of those we like to regard as ‘on our
side’. It is just that their delusions work differently, perhaps, for
example, by making them believe that only token ‘make it up as you go
along’ responses (rather than comprehensive strategies) are necessary if
we are to work our way out of the multifaceted crisis in which human
society now finds itself. This is why many ‘leaders’ of liberation
struggles as well as activist movements concerned with ending war(s) and
the climate catastrophe, for example, are so unable to articulate
appropriately visionary and functional strategies. But the problem
afflicts many other ‘progressive’ social movements as well, which limp
along making only occasional or marginal impact, if they have any impact
at all.

So what are we to do? Well, the most important thing you can do is to
never consciously participate in a delusion, whether your own or that of
anyone else. I say ‘consciously’ of course because unless you identify
the delusion, you will not be able to avoid participating in it. And
there are probably few humans in history who have avoided all of the
delusions their culture threw at them. If they did, they were probably
outcast or killed. Christ, Gandhi and King are reasonably good examples
of people in this latter category. But, historically speaking, many
activists have been killed for refusing to participate in elite-promoted
delusions. And many others have been marginalised, one way or another,
depending on the culture.

The value of not participating in a delusion, whether someone’s personal
delusion or a widespread social one, arises from the impact you have on
those around you: some of these people will have the courage to reflect
on your behaviour and reconsider their own.

If you believe you are relatively free of delusion and are committed to
taking serious steps to tackle one or more aspects of our multifaceted
global crisis, then you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to
Children‘,  and to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on
Earth‘, signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘
and/or considering using the strategic framework on one or the other of these two websites for your campaign or liberation struggle: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Living the truth on a daily basis is a tough road. And it will never
come without cost. But living in the comfort of delusion, rather than
taking action, is the path of cowards.

 

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

—
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

The Price of Resistance

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Statues at the Museum of Myths and Traditions. (León)

By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.

These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits–a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the standards they set.

You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.

To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.

Ruling institutions–the state, the press, the church, the courts, academia–mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. In times of national distress–one has only to look at Nazi Germany–all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian ideology of neoliberalism, are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are purged and turned into pariahs.

All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

The theologian James H. Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”

Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life–that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power–white power–with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”

This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.

Daniel Berrigan told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin–and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”

The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubisova approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the 1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’e’tat carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state.

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called “simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on this empathy–the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for profit–becomes political and even dangerous.

Evil is real. But so is love. And in war–especially when the heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat–you could feel, as frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from the blast of a cosmic furnace.

Flannery O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

Accept sorrow–for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem–but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.

“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

The Government Is Still the Enemy of Freedom

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

The unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

In other words, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws by voicing our opinions in public or on our clothing or before a legislative body—no matter how misogynistic, hateful, prejudiced, intolerant, misguided or politically incorrect they might be—then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.

Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors are conspiring to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good.

For instance, the protest laws being introduced across the country—in 18 states so far—are supposedly in the name of “public safety and limiting economic damage.”

Don’t fall for it.

No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.

In Arizona, police would be permitted to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that at some point becomes violent.

In Minnesota, protesters would be forced to pay for the cost of having police on hand to “police” demonstrations.

Oregon lawmakers want to “require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.”

A proposed North Dakota law would give drivers the green light to “accidentally” run over protesters who are blocking a public roadway. Florida and Tennessee are entertaining similar laws.

Pushing back against what it refers to as “economic terrorism,” Washington wants to increase penalties for protesters who block access to highways and railways.

Anticipating protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota wants to apply the governor’s emergency response authority to potentially destructive protests, create new trespassing penalties and make it a crime to obstruct highways.

In Iowa, protesters who block highways with speeds posted above 55 mph could spend five years in prison, plus a fine of up to $7,500. Obstruct traffic in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence.

A North Carolina law would make it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.

Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use “any means necessary” to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic. That legislation has since been amended to merely empower police to issue fines for such behavior.

Georgia is proposing harsh penalties and mandatory sentencing laws for those who obstruct public passages or throw bodily fluids on “public safety officers.”

Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an “unlawful assembly” after “having been lawfully warned to disperse” with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.

Missouri wants to make it illegal for anyone participating in an “unlawful assembly” to intentionally conceal “his or her identity by the means of a robe, mask, or other disguise.”

Colorado wants to lock up protesters for up to 18 months who obstruct or tamper with oil and gas equipment and charge them with up to $100,000 in fines.

Oklahoma wants to create a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure. The penalties would range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you’re part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.

Michigan hopes to make it easier for courts to shut down “mass picketing” demonstrations and fine protesters who block entrances to businesses, private residences or roadways up to $1,000 a day. That fine jumps to $10,000 a day for unions or other organizing groups.

Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways or trespassing on private property—because such laws are already on the books—then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?

What’s really going on here?

No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn’t care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.

How many times will we keep falling for the same tricks?

Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and fear and comply with the government’s dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government’s transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.

Remember, the Patriot Act didn’t make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry—private and governmental—whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.

Placing TSA agents in our nation’s airports didn’t make us safer. It simply subjected Americans to invasive groping, ogling and bodily searches by government agents. Now the TSA plans to subject travelers to even more “comprehensive” patdowns.

So, too, these protest laws are not about protecting the economy or private property or public roads. Rather, they are intended to muzzle discontent and discourage anyone from challenging government authority.

These laws are the shot across the bow.

They’re intended to send a strong message that in the American police state, you’re either a patriot who marches in lockstep with the government’s dictates or you’re a pariah, a suspect, a criminal, a troublemaker, a terrorist, a radical, a revolutionary.

Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is deliberately stirring the pot, creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.

When there is no steam valve—when there is no one to hear what the people have to say, because government representatives have removed themselves so far from their constituents—then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

Then again, perhaps that was the government’s plan all along.

As John F. Kennedy warned in March 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

The government is making violent revolution inevitable.

How do you lock down a nation?

You sow discontent and fear among the populace. You terrorize the people into believing that radicalized foreigners are preparing to invade. You teach them to be non-thinkers who passively accept whatever is told them, whether it’s delivered by way of the corporate media or a government handler. You brainwash them into believing that everything the government does is for their good and anyone who opposes the government is an enemy. You acclimate them to a state of martial law, carried out by soldiers disguised as police officers but bearing the weapons of war. You polarize them so that they can never unite and stand united against the government. You create a climate in which silence is golden and those who speak up are shouted down. You spread propaganda and lies. You package the police state in the rhetoric of politicians.

And then, when and if the people finally wake up to the fact that the government is not and has never been their friend, when it’s too late for peaceful protests and violence is all that remains to them as a recourse against tyranny, you use all of the tools you’ve been so carefully amassing—the criminal databases and surveillance and identification systems and private prisons and protest laws—and you shut them down for good.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, once a government assumes power—unconstitutional or not—it does not relinquish it. The militarized police are not going to stand down. The NSA will continue to collect electronic files on everything we do. More and more Americans are going to face jail time for offenses that prior generations did not concern themselves with.

The government—at all levels—could crack down on virtually anyone at any time.

Martin Luther King saw it coming: both the “spontaneous explosion of anger by various citizen groups” and the ensuing crackdown by the government.

“Police, national guard and other armed bodies are feverously preparing for repression,” King wrote shortly before he was assassinated. “They can be curbed not by unorganized resort to force…but only by a massive wave of militant nonviolence….It also may be the instrument of our national salvation.”

Militant nonviolent resistance.

“A nationwide nonviolent movement is very important,” King wrote. “We know from past experience that Congress and the President won’t do anything until you develop a movement around which people of goodwill can find a way to put pressure on them… This means making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, morally appealing enough, so that people of goodwill, the churches, laborers, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves begin to put pressure on congressmen to the point that they can no longer elude our demands.

“It must be militant, massive nonviolence,” King emphasized.

In other words, besides marches and protests, there would have to be civil disobedience. Civil disobedience forces the government to expend energy in many directions, especially if it is nonviolent, organized and is conducted on a massive scale. This is, as King knew, the only way to move the beast. It is the way to effect change without resorting to violence. And it is exactly what these protest laws are attempting to discourage

We are coming to a crossroads. Either we gather together now and attempt to restore freedom or all will be lost. As King cautioned, “everywhere, ‘time is winding up,’ in the words of one of our spirituals, corruption in the land, people take your stand; time is winding up.”

 

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

 

4 Ways to Throw a Monkey Wrench into the War Machine

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By Gary ‘Z’ McGee

Source: Waking Times

“When a public is stressed and confused, a big lie told repeatedly and unchallenged can become accepted truth.” ~George Orwell

One of the biggest lies told is the false notion that in order to maintain peace, we must have war. Orwellian logic.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the majority of naïve statists believe this notion to be true. This is due, in no small part, to statist conditioning and state-driven propaganda that capitalizes on a blind, patriotic whimsy. And so the war machine continues to rage on, destroying lives, while fattening the pockets of the fat cats at Lockheed Martin and Boeing, not to mention all the other companies which directly and indirectly profit from war. It’s an all-too-common tragedy. But what can you expect when living within an oligarchic plutocracy disguised as a democratic republic? Rhetorical questions aside, there must be ways in which we can, as courageous individuals, throw a monkey wrench into the war machine and thus stop it in its violent tracks.

Here are four ways to do precisely that.

1. Teach Military Members to Disobey Immoral Orders

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The military chain of command is an antiquated system of leadership that is, unfortunately still in use today. It’s the epitome of a human centipede. Everything just rolls downhill. Like lemmings hell-bent on going over whatever cliff the “higher ranking” lemmings tell them to, the military chain of command is a blatant case of “the blind leading the blind.” Leadership is nothing more than ad hoc authoritarianism disguising a greedy race to the next rank or pay raise. They are not trained to be true leaders who think for themselves; they are brainwashed to be obedient followers that follow orders without question. The entire system is set upon blind obedience.

One way to toss a wrench into the war machine is to teach its members how to courageously and strategically disobey orders, especially immoral ones. Teach them how to put their foot down, how to be a real leader who leads by example, which may, at times, seem like a “bad” example according to the corrupt chain of command, but a “good” example according to health, sustainability, morality, justice, liberty, and truth. Teach them how to be self-empowered human beings first and military members second. Teach them how all things are relative to the observer, especially regarding truth and power. Like Nietzsche said, “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

2. Question the Statist Chain of Obedience

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In today’s day and age, wars exist because of disagreeable nation states, when they could probably be resolved by reasonable men. The problem is most men are made unreasonable by being unwitting, prideful statists with nationalism and patriotism muddying their logic. As Nietzsche said, “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, and epochs, it is the rule.”

In order not to get caught up in the insanity that ends up leading to war, we must, as individuals, question the state-driven chain of obedience being shoved down our throats by the system. The problem is too many people blindly obey, even at the expense of their own freedom and liberty. There’s too much apathy and indifference and not enough logic and reasoning. We’re a nation of misguided statists propagandized and brainwashed to no end. It’s time to upset the rotten-apple cart. It’s time to turn the tables on insanity. It’s time to put the horse of spiritual power (morality), back in front of the cart of scientific power (military). In short: It’s time to disobey.

3. Transform Statist Patriotism into Worldly Patriotism

“Every transformation demands as it’s pre-condition the ending of a world-the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” ~Carl Jung

Patriotism is a tricky thing. It pulls at our heartstrings. It tugs at our pride like puppet strings. And before we know it, we’re a blind patriot, knee-jerk reacting to the prideful boasts of other blind patriots. And suddenly we’re at war. But there is a way out of this unthinking emotional bias: redefine patriotism itself by becoming an interdependent worldly patriot instead of a codependent statist patriot. All it takes is a little imagination, a little logic and reasoning toward the way everything is connected. Then we rise above the statist condition, think outside the statist box, and embrace the world-as-self/self-as-world dynamic as our patriotic start.

Becoming a worldly patriot is perhaps the most effective way to toss a wrench into the war machine, because the war machine feeds upon the statist patriotic whimsy of the masses; but it chokes on a worldly patriotism, which understands – war anywhere, is a war against ourselves as an interdependent whole.

4. Become An Anti-War Warrior

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” ~Antisthenes

An anti-war warrior has unlearned what is untrue, and has become an anti-war activist par excellence. Anti-war warriors are peaceful warriors who know when to go Tiananman Square on the war machine. They have made an art form out of civil disobedience, strategic and intelligent with their anti-war activism. When the war machine rears it’s ugly head, anti-war warriors know how to ninjaneer inside and outside the belly of the beast, using the pen just as mightily as the sword to strategically transform statist mindsets and dismantle the machine itself.

At the end of the day, the war machine is still a very real menace that cannot be ignored. We can no longer remain silent to the atrocities of the corrupt nation states that “govern” us. Their wicked war machines have been running rampant over our precious planet for far too long. It’s time we challenged it. It’s time we countered it with logic, reasoning, and thinking outside the statist box. We do this by disobeying all immoral orders passed down from both the chain of command and the chain of obedience. We do it by becoming worldly patriots and anti-war activists with the courage it takes to change the world.

“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” -Unknown