Natural Child, Natural Society: 01/10/2023

Why should it be our task to be ‘courageous’, ‘brave’, ‘generous’? Who's Job is it, really?

These are some predawn reflections written in Dublin, the morning after Mark Ryans Memorial service. I also attended Mark's funeral and cremation in London, last week, as I live in London at present.

David (left), Mark (right) during their appearance and testimony on The Late Late Show November 2022.

Why should it be the Survivors task to be ‘courageous’, ‘brave’, ‘generous’?

I am among the number of still living Survivors of Irish Catholic and Protestant and Secular Boarding Schools. One of many. One of many thousands still living today. The dead number in tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, if we start the count at the inception of the Irish State, when the De Valera Government that inherited a colonial Victorian ‘Christian’ social care, education and health care system handed it over to the Catholic Church, providing them with immense social power and solid flow of income, which they ably exploited. God needs our money, it would seem. And He needs laws as well.

The very first official report into abuse of children within those care systems was The Carrigan Report of 1931. The suppression of that report aligned with the view that Catholic morality should be the basis of the legal approach to morality. The Church was beyond reproach. This was official state policy.

I am a Survivor. One of many. Ireland has had how many public inquiries already?

And only now is the matter of the abuse of vulnerable children in Boarding Schools and Day Schools since the 1930s on the legal, political and social agenda in the public domain.

How did this come about?

In 2020/21, a group of past pupils of one fee paying boarding school, Blackrock College, Dublin, started an online group discussing how to get their College to issue a public apology to Survivors, as there had been over the last two decades or so a number of cases that had been through the courts, where perpetrators were held to account, but without a formal public apology being issued from the College itself.

A number of Survivors had been trying to get a decent response from The Spiritans for more than a decade, to no avail, in spite of strenuous effort, notably by Mark Vincent Healy, a powerhouse in this field, and others. It is a Sisyphean task, and needs many bodies to the wheel.

This most recent approach, where survivors and past pupils started conversing about this for the first time as an online group, opened a path for more Survivors to reveal their sad histories, and the realisation quickly grew that the numbers of children afflicted was way beyond anyones comprehension - an avalanche of allegations emerged, just from one short period, less than a decade, with 20% of children from one year saying how they had been afflicted, which led to Survivors making formal complaints to Irish Police forces.

It was at this point when it looked like the College was still stonewalling that David and Mark Ryan, having bumped into a radio documentary maker, almost by accident, determined that they were going to finally break the story to the Nation of Ireland which they did via the RTE Broadcast Radio documentary 'Blackrock Boys' and on TV, in November 2022 with an appearance on The Late Late Show, Irelands premier Saturday night chat show, a cultural institution much loved and respected across Ireland, and indeed across the Earth wherever Irish diaspora find themselves. That documentary has just this weekend won a major award in Europe for its makers.

Then there was 6 days of Joe Duffy, a radio talk show host, who ran 6 consecutive two hour shows on the matter, because there were that many Survivors coming forward with well corroborated allegations, which were quite horrific - the numbers of children and the brutality of their persecutors was finally being recognised, as was the cover ups. The College had always sought to protect its image, status and wealth above the needs of the children who were harmed in their care. They moved predators to other areas, where they continued to predate, creating a trail of tears that ran across continents. A pattern repeated almost everywhere Catholic clergy ran care systems of any kind,

The nation was appalled, and the Government was impelled by this publicity to acquiesce to forming a Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse within Irish Boarding and Day Schools, secular and religious alike.

The Ryan brothers were central to all of this. Their initial testimony provided the impetus for others to step forward into the light.

The Government has since then been running a Survivor Scoping Inquiry to gather information and insight from the Survivors who had come forwards, around 200 or so now elderly men, to feed into the future public inquiry. Mark, David and many, many others have been interviewed in depth about their experiences and what they want to see in a Public Inquiry. We all felt there was a great work to be done, and we were all prepared to do that work, whatever it might take.

And then Mark passed away, unexpectedly on September 21st 2023, and his obituary gives an indication of the importance of what he and his brother David did. Historic is the accurate term to use.

David and Marks close family and friends were not expecting this - indeed Mark was preparing for the long slog that a Public Inquiry entails. We all were. We were bereft when we got the news of his death. Mark was a warm, big hearted, kind gentle man. His aim was not revenge, it was justice - the justice that grounded love demands - for all Survivors, living and deceased.

Speaking to one of Marks survivor friends, he told me that Mark said to him : "We should never have become friends!" and what he meant was it was the shared injustice, the harm and trauma of being predated upon within a setting that gave the predators carte blanche and a protective veil to continue abusing children that had 'thrown us together'.

At the funeral and memorial, much was said of Marks courage, to take on the most powerful institutions in the way he was envisaging it. We all knew it was going to be a struggle, a fight, a matter that might well wear us down, again and again.

Yesterday I asked myself “Why do we have to fight for justice?”

Why fight? Why us? Why me? This is not self pity, it is a really good question.

Why must we - the harmed - take up a struggle against Institutions of great wealth and power to see to it that our stories are told and understood, to see to it that those who were culpable are held to account, to see to it that they make appropriate reparations, to see to it that we receive the support we need as we arrive at elderhood, (is that a word?), to see to it that this country creates a social care system that nurtures the most vulnerable among us, to see to it that we build a society that nurtures all of us, from in utero to the grave?

Why must we fight? Why is this a struggle? Why are we so often on our own?

Why is it that Adult Survivors of childhood abuse, survivors of violent rape, survivors of daily psychological torture, survivors of physical beatings, survivors of deliberate neglect of such degree and quantity that it can be fairly called an atrocity, are expected to be courageous, generous, or brave and take up that task outlined above?

Why is it that we old men, all of us ordinary people who were just small innocent children whose real needs went unmet, because we were groomed, bullied, beaten, broken, shattered, splattered, torn, raped and shredded and so grossly mistreated in such unspeakable manner within institutional ‘care’ systems, and schools, in ways that scarred and mashed our souls and warped our core sense of self out of all recognition, twisting our hearts and breaking our minds, our guts wrenched in pain and terror, our sleep punctuated by night sweats and terrors, our days polluted by rage and despair, living in fear of the next day, trauma reverberations distorting our lives forever, are expected to be courageous, generous, brave and why are we the ones who have to fight for justice?

Why are we alone, in Society? Are we not a significant demographic already?

Where are you? Where were you then and where are you now?

What is it then when so many of us are indeed kind, gentle men and also broken, broken, broken and holding that within ourselves, that we have to take up this gargantuan task, often on our own?

Colm O'Gorman was in that position decades ago, in 1998. He knows.

Colm O' Gorman Eulogy at the Memorial for Mark Ryan

(apologies for sound quality, my bad)

What kind of culture expected us to keep calm, and carry on?

Why is it that we cannot rail and scream and cry and be heard, recognised, validated and be protected?

Why is it that the Church and State, the institutions that operated, funded and exploited those care systems are not expected to be courageous, brave, generous let alone honest?

What is it, that you expect the Church and State to be defensive.

’It’s only to be expected.’ ‘

What else do you expect?’

Restorative Justice? Before any real or meaningful justice has been achieved?

Really?

Why has every cohort of children abused within institutional settings who survived into adulthood had to struggle with both Church and State, and the wider community, to gain public recognition of what was done?

Industrial Schools, Orphanages, Mothers and Babies Homes, Magdalene Launderies, Mental Asylums, Boarding Schools, Day Schools.

What does that say about Irish society, Irish culture and Irish history?

What does this say about you and I?

What is that?

What is that all about?

Why is it that both Church and State are expected to be defensive, dishonest and not expected to be humble, generous, courageous and kind?

Why must we fight for justice?

Why?

What happened did not happen - it was done to us.

What happens to a child when he is tormented by a depraved, violent nasty adult?

What happens to a child when he is repeatedly tormented by a depraved, violent nasty adult and no one listens, hears or understands, and that child has to carry that terror and pain in silence, unprotected, alone, as he lives on, day by day, fearing the next day, every day.

What happens when the detail of that child's experience is so unspeakable that the child himself cannot describe it and does not want to remember any of it - what happens for the child afterwards?

What happens to a child when he or she is tormented by a depraved, violent nasty adult and no one listens, hears or understands, when no one steps in to defend the child, to protect the child from the depraved and violent adult and it happens within a care system, and that child has to carry that terror in silence, alone, as he or she lives on, day by day?

Do you know what it is to live only because you find yourself alive, numbed to the core, unable to live for anything? That is not resilience.

What happens when the child tries to speak of what was done to him or her and no one wants to hear of it? What happens to the adult Survivor when he tries to speak and no one wants to hear of it?

What happens when this desperate thing is institutionalised, when this level of mistreatment is systemic across a country, within the governance of a State, paid for by taxes?

What happens when this is done for decades, afflicting generations of children?

An action is taken, a thing is done, harm is caused and no one intervenes and there are aftershocks, outcomes, reverberations - none of them good or healthy.

How many children endured this, how many attempted to live on only to die early, broken beyond coping - how many survivors did not survive long? They are invisible, vanished. The dead do not speak to the living. They cannot fight for justice. They will never receive justice.

The living cannot speak to the dead, only to each other, and still be heard.

What happens to a generation of children when a significant number of us are tormented by depraved, violently nasty adults and no one listens, hears or understands, when no one steps in to defend those children, to protect the children from known depraved, violent adults and it happens within a care system, repeatedly, and those children have to carry that terror and their interior wounded state in silence, often unknown to each other, alone in a crowded room, as they live on, day by day?

What happens to them when they in turn become parents, and find themselves struggling with their next generation of children, unable to respond naturally, openly, unable to meet their needs, having lived with their needs as children unmet.

Do you know what it is like to be that child, growing into a teen, becoming an adult, carrying that toxic load in silence, trying to live well, flailing and failing?

Who indeed needs to be brave, courageous and generous?

Who needs to put their hand up, and who should admit to what was done - not ‘what happened’ - but what was done to so many little children. What was done quite deliberately - who needs to put their hand up for that?

Church and State and people protected Church and State and people, and they all knew this was being done.

We are not victims. We were victimised.

Theres a crucial difference between the two statements.

I don’t want to fight for justice. I want justice. I’m tired, exhausted, breaking. We are tired, exhausted, breaking. Thousands upon thousands of us, our needs as children unmet, our needs as adult survivors unmet.

Why must we fight for justice?

Why do you, even still, forsake us so?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Peace is more than the absence of War, Peace is healthy relationships across all human cultures.

The culture you and I were all born into is not a healthy human culture...

Study the lives of ordinary people as they are affected by the decisions of empires that pass over their land.
Examine how the lives of the most vulnerable are adversely impacted by the decisions of the most powerful is the real honest history.

Then you will see it’s less about the celebrated political leaders and states than it is about hierarchy of wealth and power cultures and the layers of violence they deploy, and that the populations traumatised are in reality a single, global historical and extant demographic.

The native peoples everywhere colonisation happens, the Jewish people in Europe and Russia, the Irish, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Armenians, the Aboriginal peoples, the Palestinians, the Royhingya, the Cambodians, the Africans, the native Americans north and south, and so many more, so many more, the impoverished everywhere and their children.

State and their wealthy rulers exploit people, they rarely nurture people.
We must change that, you and I, with our families, our neighbours, our communities in our polities - we must change all of this, for the bullies will not.

Egalitarian peoples of the Amazon Forest.

This culture into which I and you were born has is a systemic cultural hierarchy of wealth and power and layers of violence to maintain that power, through deliberately created structural Power disparities.
Be it kings or plutocrats, communism or capitalism, theocracy or warlords - it’s the same pattern.

It’s not normal healthy human behaviour. That much is clear.
We are not evolved to be bullied or to become bullies. If we were it would not cause us so much distress and ill health.
Bullying is learned. And the most interesting thing is that the vast majority of people are not prone to bullying, indeed we suffer terribly when we are bullied.

We all grow up somewhere and we all internalise many aspects of that somewhere- this is a natural process. Internalising the love of parents, siblings, community, language, immediate environment and habitat is a natural process.

People born into Christianity internalise its values, people burn into Judaism internalise its values.
People born into Capitalism internalise its values.
People born into a traumatised family internalise those values, even when there is no malicious intent in the parents or their community.
People born into egalitarian cultures internalise the values of their culture.
And so it goes.

One of the most toxic thought forms is that this current condition - hierarchy of power - defines ‘humanity’ as a species, when it’s really just a culture.

The violent hierarchy system aka The Dominator Culture is understood to be no more than 15,000 years old.

Prior to that we were mostly egalitarian, matrilineal and peaceable. Integrated into our environment, our shared spaces, shared with plants and animals, shared with deep insight, respect and gratitude.

The task before us is to reclaim our natural healthy relationships and behavioural dynamics - it’s not a question of ‘evolution’, as often suggested by New Age ideology and other ideologies associated with religions that hold ideas of Satan or any other supernatural Evil Force.
It is a question of healthy natural relationships, between adults and children, between systems of governance and peoples.
-----
Here's an excerpt from Robert Sapolsky's book 'Behave' which takes a deep, well informed look at human behaviour and the biology of our behaviour and makes note of what is known as 'lateral violence' - what happens when people of one strata feel under intense pressure and feel important to make appropriate effective changes aka disempowered. I highly recommend all my readers to get a copy of 'Behave', and read it many times, dipping in and out - it's an astounding work, covers a lot of ground, very readable, informative and Sapolsky's writing, like his lectures, is quite naturally entertaining, at ease with deep knowledge without hubris or arrogance, and I think it carries a profound message about human behaviour and human cultural variation that all of us would gain something from.
"STRATIFIED VERSUS EGALITARIAN CULTURES"

```'Another meaningful way to think about cross-cultural variation concerns how unequally resources (e.g., land, food, material goods, power, or prestige) are distributed.— Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian, as we’ll soon see, throughout hominin history. Inequality emerged when “stuff”—things to possess and accumulate—was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies.

Why have stratified cultures dominated the planet, generally replacing more egalitarian ones? For population biologist Peter Turchin, the answer is that stratified cultures are ideally suited to being conquerors—they come with chains of command.— Both empirical and theoretical work suggests that in addition, in unstable environments stratified societies are “better able to survive resource shortages [than egalitarian cultures] by sequestering mortality in the lower classes.” In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death. Notably, though, stratification is not the only solution to such instability—this is where hunter-gatherers benefit from being able to pick up and move.

A score of millennia after the invention of inequality, Westernized societies at the extremes of the inequality continuum differ strikingly.

One difference concerns “social capital.” Economic capital is the collective quantity of goods, services, and financial resources. Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. You learn a ton about a community’s social capital with two simple questions.

First: “Can people usually be trusted?” A community in which most people answer yes is one with fewer locks, with people watching out for one another’s kids and intervening in situations where one could easily look away.

The second question is how many organizations someone participates in—from the purely recreational (e.g., a bowling league) to the vital (e.g., unions, tenant groups, co¬ op banks). A community with high levels of such participation is one where people feel efficacious, where institutions work transparently enough that people believe they can effect change. People who feel helpless don’t join organizations.

Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital.— Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, to have efficacy, to be visible. (For example, as income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.)

Almost by definition, you can’t have a society with both dramatic income inequality and plentiful social capital. Or translated from social science-ese, marked inequality makes people crummier to one another.

This can be shown in various ways, studied on the levels of Westernized countries, states, provinces, cities, and towns. The more income inequality, the less likely people are to help someone (in an experimental setting) and the less generous and cooperative they are in economic games. Early in the chapter, I discussed cross-cultural rates of bullying and of “antisocial punishment,” where people in economic games punish overly generous players more than they punish cheaters.* Studies of these phenomena show that high levels of inequality and/or low levels of social capital in a country predict high rates of bullying and of antisocial punishment.—

Chapter 11 examines the psychology with which we think about people of different socioeconomic status; no surprise, in unequal societies, people on top generate justifications for their status.— And the more inequality, the more the powerful adhere to myths about the hidden blessings of subordination—“They may be poor, but at least they’re happy/honest/loved.” In the words of the authors of one paper, “Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: Income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.”

Thus unequal cultures make people less kind. Inequality also makes people less healthy. This helps explain a hugely important phenomenon in public health, namely the “socioeconomic status (SES)/health gradient”—as noted, in culture after culture, the poorer you are, the worse your health, the higher the incidence and impact of numerous diseases, and the shorter your life expectancy.—

Extensive research has examined the SES/health gradient. Four quick rule- outs:

(a) The gradient isn’t due to poor health driving down people’s SES. Instead low SES, beginning in childhood, predicts subsequent poor health in adulthood.

(b) It’s not that the poor have lousy health and everyone else is equally healthy. Instead, for every step down the SES ladder, starting from the top, average health worsens.

(c) The gradient isn’t due to less health-care access for the poor; it occurs in countries with universal health care, is unrelated to utilization of health-care systems, and occurs for diseases unrelated to health¬ care access (e.g., juvenile diabetes, where having five checkups a day wouldn’t change its incidence).

(d) Only about a third of the gradient is explained by lower SES equaling more health risk factors (e.g., lead in your water, nearby toxic waste dump, more smoking and drinking) and fewer protective factors (e.g., everything from better mattresses for overworked backs to health club memberships).

What then is the principal cause of the gradient? Key work by Nancy Adler at UCSF showed that it’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES (e.g., the answer to “How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES.

Crucial work by the social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham added to this picture: it’s not so much that poverty predicts poor health; it’s poverty amid plenty—income inequality. The surest way to make someone feel poor is to rub their nose in what they don’t have.

Why should high degrees of income inequality (independent of absolute levels of poverty) make the poor unhealthy? Two overlapping pathways:

A psychosocial explanation has been championed by Ichiro Kawachi of Harvard. When social capital decreases (thanks to inequality), up goes psychological stress. A mammoth amount of literature explores how such stress—lack of control, predictability, outlets for frustration, and social support—chronically activates the stress response, which, as we saw in chapter 4, corrodes health in numerous ways.

A neomaterialist explanation has been offered by Robert Evans of the University of British Columbia and George Kaplan of the University of Michigan. If you want to improve health and quality of life for the average person in a society, you spend money on public goods—better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct benefit the wealthy feel from improving public goods.

Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good—a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, “The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition” (e.g., lobbying). Evans notes how this “secession of the wealthy” promotes “private affluence and public squalor.” Meaning worse health for the have-nots. –

The inequality/health link paves the way for understanding how inequality also makes for more crime and violence. I could copy and paste the previous stretch of writing, replacing “poor health” with “high crime,” and I’d be set. Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty amid plenty is. For example, extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations.

Why does income inequality lead to more crime? Again, there’s the psychosocial angle—inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. And there’s the neomaterialist angle— inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. Kaplan has shown, for example, that states with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education. As with inequality and health, the psychosocial and neomaterial routes synergize.

A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons—if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order.

It’s something similar here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor.

This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.— The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage.

Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant."

Militarism Today - A Dominator Cult destroying human health, everywhere.

I have attended a good few outdoor dance festivals during my career as a musician and as a DJ. I cannot even begin to imagine the terror and horror of what was done to those young people dancing, loving, laughing.

Militarism and it's children: factories producing industrial scale of weapons and supplies, with money taken from workers to fund it, warfare, is shredded bodies, blood and gore, civilian wastelands, shock, terror, chaos, confusion, vomit, spatter, puddle, piss, excrement, burning flesh, cries and groans, hours upon hours upon days upon weeks upon months upon years and centuries of muttered agony and death.

Rest in Peace, they say - too late I say.

Peace is, for the living, an absolute necessity. Peace in death is a delusion. There's no evidence for it either. The only evidence of Peace can be found amongst the living. The only reason for Peace is found amongst the living. Peace is a necessity for human life to thrive happily.

The horror, the disgusting reality of warfare, the smell and vision of wars upon wars, upon wars, cities, towns, villages aand homes filled with gore and grief, hatred and sorrow. Blood and mud, blood and sand, blood and water, blood and snow, blood and asphalt, blood and concrete, blood and grass, blood and glass, blood and babies, blood and their mothers, even in utero, spattered human flesh, and excreta, and body parts beyond recognition, that’s war.

Millenia of men slaughtering one another, for honour, pride, land, conquest.

Those who survive, are scarred, by degree. Nobody who wages war, who does the fighting, wins. Not on any side. They all lose. The merchants of death do make a solid profit, of course they do. That's the point.

A music festival is attacked, hundreds murdered, wounded, some taken captive, thousands flee in total terror. They were dancing, doing no harm at all. Israel 2023

A shopping centre is hit by a missile, fifty four die immediately, hundreds injured. Ukraine 2023

An attack helicopter mistakes a group of journalists, cites them as ‘terrorists’, gets approval for a strike, strikes and then attacks a rescue van, with a child in the front passenger seat. Iraq 2004

An entire population subjected to a militarised blockade, now facing aerial bombardment by drones. Gaza, for decades, 2023.

A squad of combat troops enter a peasant village, and proceed to murder everyone, burn their entire village to the ground. A helicopter pilot sees this, intervenes, stops massacre. The matter is covered-up, more or less. Vietnam 1970s.

Israeli military issue press release announcing more aerial bombardment of Gaza, acknowledges it may harm some hostages, accepts that price. Tel Aviv 2023

A hospital and school and water treatment plant in Yemen are bombed by Saudi pilots in American War Jets, serviced by American and British technicians. Yemen 2022

Hamas gives warning that unless Israel cease the aerial bombardment of civilians in Gaza, which is happening, which they are enduring would be to murder one hostage, every hour, one by one. Gaza 2023.

Revenge on both sides feeding the oven of hate, baking the crusty bread of hatred hard. Such a bread cannot be chewed and digested when it is baked so hard.

Armenian ethnic Azerbaijani’s flee Azerbaijan, as ethnic Azerbaijani’s take militarised control of their province. 2023

Old men make decisions that throw millions of people into war, millions of entirely innocent people, families, grand parents, children, homes, villages, farms. Lives destroyed.

The vulnerability of us ordinary folk, when a military ‘operation’ runs through our shared commons is real.

The power disparity is immense.

Families at a wedding or a funeral facing armed, trained, resourced combat troops and their supporting machinery?

A small party of dancers in the desert are attacked by traumatised angry raging people using automatic weapons, deploying military skill set against defenceless holiday makers. War is horrific.

Apparently this is all illegal, under International Law. Which is true. It is.

Who upholds the Law? No-one does.

Who does not? Every militarised state that engages in warfare.

Why? Because warfare is a tool of the Dominator Culture.

Who pays for it? We do, us ordinary people, everywhere.

How do they get away with it? Because they succeed in dividing us, and they hold a power disparity we cannot counter unless we are fully united in humane solidarity, as a polity, and refuse to take sides in any war or allow our children to be enlisted.

Who has the power, who wields the power, for what purpose, with what outcomes for the population and our shared commons?

The thorny matter of an intentionally constructed historical Social and Material Power Disparity being exploited - causing great harm to the disempowered, the vulnerable population of ordinary folk, and our shared environment raises its ugly head.

Chop! Chop! Here we go.

I read history. I grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in Ireland.

I studied the history of empires from Sumer through to the British Empire. The Irish had a reason to teach this history to their children. Empire has scarred our land, our people long time. And yet Peace in Northern Ireland was made to happen, mostly by ordinary women and men working together, from all the divided sides, seeking to end the divisions the political hierarchy creates. It is a work in progress.

I understand the dynamics of cultural hierarchies of violence. I understand why violence is utilised - it serves as enforcement of dominance, suppressing all actual or perceived threats.

The there's the cultural memes - The Warrior Gene, strategies for mating, violent men as ‘protectors’, women as their grateful servants, conjugal rights - these are all part of a deliberate set up, an anti-social system maintaining the constant threat, with frequent proven examples to let everyone know the capacity for extreme violence is close by, that it has been deployed, and that it can be deployed, and probably will be deployed. And there’s nothing the ordinary person can do about it.

The data tells us the violence is cyclical. Again and again and again - the data tells us the deployment of organised violence is cultural.

Social conditioning and education drive consumers towards dystopian movies, reenactments and novels, predictions of Armageddon, all of which deliberately romanticise the realities of mass violence out of recognition, for a pretty penny and some titillation. Rambo.

Historical knowledge across most carefully ‘educated’ populations is, in all honesty, merely a general or potted knowledge of history, focused on celebrities and national identity, rather than a good understanding of the source data on the lived experience of the most vulnerable among us, as their lives are impacted by the decisions of the most powerful, in the relevant space and time being discussed. The history of Kings and the great and the good is not the history of the people.

The narrative of the good guy doing bad violence for good, the dehumanisation of both in that portrayal.

Violence is always cyclical - the only way to stop the cycle is to cease the violence, start negotiations, and keep talking until it’s done.

It IS that simple, yes, obviously it would be complex to set up and at the same time the only serious complications would be the interference of those who want more war. Whoever they are, right? Not naming any names....

Peace is more than the absence of war.” Wrote Arundhutii Roy

It is certain that the deliberate absence of Militarism is one likely social and material certification of peace.

It is also, importantly, critically so, that Peace include the deliberate absence of poverty, of low wages, of worker exploitation, of environmental degradation, of air, land and water being poisoned.

Peace is the absence of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination, othering, classism and other forms of category aimed abusive behaviour.

It’s all part of what is clearly unhealthy human behaviour.

It’s nonsensical to suggest this degree of unhealthy behaviour is ‘natural’ - it is more precise to say that this unhealthy behaviour is a cultural behaviour. The Dominator Cult.

Peace is a place of health, good health, robust health, empathy, kindness and creativity, with ample capacity to share, learn, nurture. We are evolved for that peace - the peace of the womb must also be set within the peace of the community. The nuclear family is a time bomb.

Whereas when one honestly observes this we can see that the culture itself, as a body of thought, resources, people and material infrastructure in operation over time, is clearly unhealthy, because it has been causing immense harm for millennia, and still is - in spite of the comforts of the middle classes, the poverty of low paid workers feeds the vast wealth of the Oligarchs.

This culture is clearly behaving in a distorted manner, not healthy at all.

Here’s the thing, in spite of all the horror, it is still true and will always be true, that as a species we are evolved to learn - we children can learn healthy relationships from an adult community that is healthy, just as we children learn dysfunctional or coping or shame based relationships if our parents are distressed, wounded , traumatised and coping as best they can, let alone the malicious ‘teachings’ of various spiritual traditions that hold there is a darkness, an evil in us all waiting for an opportunity that can only be prevented by adopting a religious belief system.

You know, we are human - we're sensitive, and thus we are all prone to aches, pains, unhappy moods and feeling hurt.

We adults have a task to build that kind of community where children can learn from healthy adult humans who healthy for the species, a species evolved for deep emotional bonding sustained over many decades, across a community that shares the same habitat, even if some of us are sometimes grumpy, weird, crazy, vulnerable, cross - we learn to regulate our emotional reactions... so that we can respond rather than react.

That’s who we really are. Friends, family, lovers, colleagues, communities.

War is horrific.

Part of my grief is the loss of the egalitarian experience and environment for all of us.

I think about billions of persons, each a warm living beating heart, a warm soft body, a mind, a family, a community that is missing that basic evolved-for state - the egalitarian human - the natural child within a natural community of healthy adults, children and elders, emotionally healthy, physically healthy, barring accidents, or injuries or the odd scuffle or temper tantrum.

We are, after all, only human.

War is horrific.

We have to look at it as it really is.

Stop taking sides... really.

Too many, far too many have stood shivering in trenches, behind defences, preparing to attack, on foot, or defend from their position, having endured a massive artillery barrage or a siege.

Far too many families sheltered as best they could with what little that had, and were found and slaughtered, because they could not run away.

That’s war, young men ordered to move out, to approach the young men on the other side or sides, and kill or capture them. Orders issued by old politicians.

War is reckless barbaric cruelty on an industrial scale. Rich and powerful old men issue the orders.

Orders are to subdue and control the civilian population that survives.

Detect enemy forces hiding in that population and then destroy them. Until they are chased out, and the other side come waging war through that territory. Or the war ends, for now, at least. Kosovo 2023.

Again and again.

Oceans of death, mountains of grief, clouds of cold misery raining upon generation after generation.

Gore. So much gore.

I get a bad feeling when I weigh it all up.

Which is distressing.

And I know this that anything on the horizon of as bad as it gets living through war, surviving, I wouldn’t wish that on my anyone. I have no enemies. You have no enemies. States declare enemies. Religions declare enemies. Ordinary people do not declare enemies. Nobody should ever have to live through warfare.

It ain’t natural.

I think we, the people, we need all of us, to stand in solidarity with all human beings. Only we can heal the dynamic of enemies and Power struggles.

We need to look, without bias, at the human cost of war culture and work out how to prevent war as part of the same task as confronting climate change, poverty, misogyny.

We need to break the spells of propaganda and hope.

We need to let go of all that. We need to say no to the propaganda, all the time. Never let them speak lies and bias without being challenged with honesty and evidence.

We need to look at war as it really is at the human level, to the lived experience of the person caught up within it, whatever their situation within it is.

The lived experience of Survivors of war, told without taking sides, tells us what happens to ordinary people caught up in warfare.

What really happens?

We need to see the reality of war as a culture, a cult that has taken over our peoples - only then will us civilians have the base for the common sense, the human moral courage to commit that we will do this together, all us ordinary people, we will do what ever it will take to make Peace our fundamental cultural value, our human keystone, our social foundation, our infrastructure and our global heart beat.

Hamas combat operations targeted an electronic dance festival in Southern Israel.

Ordinary people, from a global community, dancing in the desert. Oh! the heartbeats, those poor hearts. Those youngsters at a party in the desert.. unspeakable.

Grief beyond any comprehension, shock, visceral outrage. I can’t imagine the terror, the confusion, the chaos, the horror, the grief, the fear, the numbing, the running, the losing one’s way, the falls that fleeing people do, the injuries, the things they saw happen in front go them, the impotence, the power disparity in that moment of dancers facing trained combat groups with automatic assault weapons.

Fleeing knowing others behind you were falling, and being executed…the tears and frustration, the desperate reality of being in that atrocity situation.

War is horrific.

This kind of violence is cultural, and for that reason it is also cyclical. The War Cult thrives because it is always fighting for its survival. It wages war against the peace activists at home and abroad.

Therein lies an area of discussion too real for 21st Century politics.

Change the culture, break the cycles of violence.

THAT is the task.

It is possible, because it is a human task to undo human harm. No god can undo what harm humans cause. Breaking the cycles of trauma and violence is one of the most humanising tasks to which one could commit oneself and one’s community in the long term.

Even if from some angles that claim looks quite ambitious, somewhat improbable and blatantly implausible right now, it must be said, because……..

War is horrific.

The more war violence I see, the more I detest those who enable war as a methodology of power, the more compassion I have for survivors, the more outrage I feel on behalf of us ordinary folk, globally.

Heartbreaking.