The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
William Rees Mogg, in The Times, February 1st, 2010 writes in his first paragraph of an article headed : - Blair the dictator bulldozed us into war -
" It may never lead to his being tried in any court, but there is nevertheless a public verdict of his responsibility for the British action in Iraq." ...
Why might it never lead to a trial? What right does he have to make such an assertion and then pour his feeble outrage onto paper for the public domain, and at the same time imply that 'International Law needs to be clarified' - International Law prohibiting War is the clearest Law on the planet. What planet is Rees-mogg on, or more to the point what drugs?
Is not the Law clear? YES.
Has not the crime been reported to British Police? YES
Is there an investigation under way(ish) at The London Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit? YES
Is this a secret or covert operation, requiring special police investigation? NO!
So, why is Rees Mogg not saying all of this and not asking the following questions :
WHY IS THAT INVESTIGATION STALLED?
WHO IS STALLING IT?
AND WHAT ARE THE FULL CHARGES, and the LIST OF ALL THOSE LEGALLY LIABLE FOR THESE WAR CRIMES?
have written to EVERY MP, to every News Media outlet, have hosted meetings in both Houses of Parliament, posted videos to youtube, have facebook, myspace, twitter and other online resources, which have been active for quite some time (the first attempt at reporting war crimes was in 2001, for Afghnaistan!) and have an online international campaign informing people of the Law, and asking that the Law be obeyed, calling their campaign a CIVIL OBEDIENCE campaign. Hardly the shrinking violets of the activist movement, yet totally ignored by mainstream mdeia, an absolutely focussed and active ignorance. Caught in the act of ignoring.
While certain forces may have bulldozed towards war, as Rees Mogg writes, certain others (public intellectuals, media pundits etc ) refused to face the facts at the time : That War as a Tool of Policy Enforcement is wrong, amoral AND illegal.... and they parroted the lines that Policy dictated. Terrorists. WMD. Nasty Dictators (who used weapons systems our State sold him on his own people, who waged a war with Iran on our States behalf). Half truths are often worse than outright lies.
http://www.medialens,org a British website that had been challenging the way in which media reports wars with such deep bias as to actively support those wars, is replete with such examples, carefully de-constructed, almost to tedium, based on irrefutable evidence, by the medialens crew; and vehemently defended by said intellectuals and pundits. Some of the former is quite entertaining. Most of the latter is utterly reprehensible.
And now, when the veil is lifted by Blair himself, when he exposed his crass logic and astute denial before Chilcott's gentle probing, in full public view, (with no option but to go the whole hog), a veil many of us have been able to pierce and had removed, even as he prepared for war, and so now, some of these intellectuals finally find their voice? Give us a break!
STOP THE WAR coalition must have known at the time that the war was utterly illegal. They have access to the best legal minds in the country. Look to the results of their actions. Did they inform or mop up concern? Did they harness the compassion, the horror and anger of the people and use that to act, or did they organise a we will 'do our best' gig, much as Bob Geldof might have, again mopping up concern, knowing that it was futile because it offered no real challenge?
A general strike would have been a good move. A blockade by the 2 million people and their friends who did not turn up for the march, yet who supported the intent of that march in Hyde Park would have been fun. And effective.It was estimated that for every one person on that march at least another 4 agreed with them. Some say 15. That's between 8 and 30 million people. That's a lot of power if marshalled. Polls say more than that opposed the war. Anyways, STWC failed, and failed miserably, in their stated aims.
So back to the future, 2010 : the majority of mainstream media even still parrot the policy line; Blair's testimony last Friday was 'assured', a 'fine performance' according to most press this weekend...
Iran still the de-stabilising force in Iraq ( a lie I have dealt with in detail elsewhere), Tony the 'victim' of circumstance and unfortunate planning...
The disconnect is further highlighted with the recent press coverage of the issue of assisted death in cases of severe debilitating painful fatal disease, where the assistance is requested by individuals whose minds are clear, whose intent is clear, whose assistant is a close and dearly loved one.
The DPP saw fit to go ahead with a prosecution for murder for a woman who helped her daughter, who had lain in bed for nearly 20 years, her body shattered by disease, her life shattered by constant unrelenting pain, who had decided enough is enough and I want to die, and was so weakened she required assistance up to the point she herself pressed the plunger of the syringe containing her final does, her final act in her own life.
Yet stalls with regard to a man and a system that not only failed to protect a nation of 29 million innocent people, but actively and illegally enabled a war of aggression, that denied the Iraqis grass roots democracy when the Iraqis made so bold as to unite and hold their own elections, that selected it's own chosen men to run Iraqs cities, towns and villages, that actively funded and supplied a police force that actively repressed those who dared to engage their own democracy, that started a war of resistance that was portrayed as 'sectarian', that led to even more slaughter, torture, terror for Iraqis?
These are the facts.
What say you now, Rees Mogg? Defend your pious stance from this perspective. You cannot!
Take a walk to your local police station, and report the crimes of Blair and the UK Government. Do something useful.
Naomi Klein talks about protest and what actually works. As I have written many times, if the UK population had gone on strike in March 2003, stayed on the streets for just a week or two, the UK involvement in the Iraq War of Aggression would have been impossible without a direct confrontation between the UK Government and the people, the tax payers who fund that Government.
We have to look at what stops people from taking to the streets to express dissent, to demostrate our power as a collective of diverse and humane people.
There are the various Laws and regulations that Government puts in place to inhibit protest or dissent on the streets. Those Laws must be broken, by large numbers of people, so as to render them useless. This is alegally viable option, in that it is permissable to commit a lessor, non-violent crime to prevent the comission of a far greater violent crime.
There are the perceptions of protest that the media present. Those who work for the Media and promote such precpetions must be confornted with their actions, by letter, email, by phone and by written criticism.
There are the various psychological inhibitions, imbued primarily through schooling, that are the basis for obedience. This must be addressed by parents, to protect their children and protect their childrens autonomy and intelligence.
And there are the divide and rule tactics that pit us against each other, that comparmentalise people by religion, status, class, sex and stereotypes. This must be addressed by all those subject to such labelling and by the leadership of any such groups of people.
Each has to be addressed and understood by all those who dissent and where they rear their ugly heads, let them be identified, named and revealed for what they are, for that will disempower these inhibitions.
Beliefs and Behaviour Patterns are Neural Pathways that have Become Hardened.
As the brain is growing and forming in the young child, with each new experience a new neural pathway is created, and as those experiences are repeated that pathway or sets of pathways get used repeatedly. Thus certain pathways will become ‘well-worn’ or ‘hardened’.
This is necessary, and is how, for example, learning to ride a bike gets to a point where one does not need to think about it. The thinking during repeated training has formed enough of a pathway series to carry out all the various task required to maintain balance, note direction, read the ground and so on. Without having to think about it, whilst retaining the ability to respond to subtle changes.
Learning
In this way the child learns and stores vital skills, such as control of her/his limbs, balance, co-ordination and so on.
We know that it takes about 10,000 hours of training to become competently fluent on say a given musical instrument so that one is a 'virtuoso', (indeed any particular skill/talent) that is then viewed, in our culture, as ‘pretty damn good’.
This applies to physical action as much as thought processes.
We know that children learn much quicker when their learning is self-directed, and that the enthusiasm of the child is a major factor in driving what they will learn.
We know that infants and very young children learn at rapid rate, way beyond what is learned in later life, at university and as ones ‘career’ develops.
It stands to reason that this learning ability is a biological imperative. The child in nature has much to learn, much that is essential for self-reliance and thus survival or as I like to say ‘thrivival’, and not a huge amount of time to do it in. Can it be that natures learning driver is pleasure, or ease or an aura of empathy?
What is obvious to me, and to many others, is this : this mode of learning cannot be improved in any way by any artifice!
Typically indigenous peoples children are fully competent by age 6.
That is to say they are no longer utterly dependent and are considered an asset to their community. It is common for older children to care for the younger children, and there is much learning that is passed from child to child, rather than from adult to child. That adult to child sharing comes later, as the child approaches young adulthood.
To give you an idea of just how much a typical indigenous person will learn, I have seen estimates of a comparison of the botanical knowledge of a rain forest dweller compared to that of a European university trained botanist. The estimate suggests that the indigenous forest dweller contains the equivalent of 35 botanists with 15 years experience each!
That goes way beyond anything we in the West now consider an ‘expert’ or’ virtuoso’. Who is learning what? What is being taught?
Given this amazing learning ability and the imaginal intentional capacity of the natural human being, what are the implications for the natural child in a typical industrial society school environment?
Immediately arises the question of how much time does a child spend in a school environment as opposed to the real world (which is where the natural child’s learning is logically based)?
What does the loss of that real-world learning mean for the natural child being westernised, industrialised?
Given the general tendency within indigenous peoples to respect the unique personal entity, to embrace diversity and independence along side interdependence, what does the current practice of the 'teaching' of ‘belief systems’ imply for the natural child? And what does that imply for society?
The Roots of Modern Compulsory State Education
To answer these questions, in the context of a western styled education, one has to go to the roots of that system and seek out the inspiration for it. John Taylor Gatto has done that in great detail in his phenomenal work, “The Underground History of American Education”. I will give a brief description here, culled from his book.
The initial inspiration for Western Mass Schooling, or Compulsory State Education, came from observations ,by the British Empire in India, of the Hindi Rote System of education devised for the lower classes within the Hindi system. It was an Anglican Military Chaplain who first observed and understood how this system worked. His name was Andrew Bell.
What he saw and understood was that by gathering the children into large groups, where they had to learn drills by rote, where corporal punishment was widely used, where there was a number of powerful external imperatives to show that one had learned, (could repeat the scriptures, perform the rituals, read the texts, understood one's place in Hindi Society, embodied the concepts of class and so on) the Hindi Caste system had created a psychologically solid state and class structure that had endured for thousands of years, and had resisted the British in spite of the British technological superiority in sea faring and in warfare.
Indeed there was meeting of minds in that the elites of both cultures recognised each other, and thus the British Raj, an accommodation of equals, both ruling their respective masses. The older was to refine the younger. And this was driven largely by commercial interests.
The Hindi Class System
An ancient civilisation, one which had propsered peacefully for millenia, The Political Structure of the Hindi Caste system, at the time of the English invasion of India, looked a bit like this :
Top 5% of three groups : in Order of Power : Brahmin's (priests and the professions), Warriors and Administrators, Merchants and Land Cultivators
Lower 95% of two groups : Menials, and Untouchables.
The Brahmin's ensured that the warriors, administrators and the bulk of the leaderships received a diluted insight into the drivers of this system, so that they alone retained overall control.
The lower 95% received the mass schooling, administered by teachers, who drilled student leaders, who then drilled hundreds of students, in groups of ten or so, all of this in large single rooms. The entire operation of each school was directed by a single Brahmin.
And all this because the belief systems were so entrenched by the time the child was 7 or so, ‘hardwired’ if you will, the overall system of the Hindi centralised power was secure.
“The entire purpose of the Hindu (Western Compulsion) Schooling was to preserve the class system.”
At the time there was no formalised education in the British Empire, apart from the few elite schools and colleges. The peasant yeomanry were to a large degree self educated. Home schooled. The recent move from peasant yeomanry to factory and mine worker had transformed the British Empire, though there was stiff resistance to this move, as the yeomanry/peasant came from a background of liberty and dignity. The Luddites were literate and clearly understood the what the coming factory system implied. The loss of their lands via The Enclosure Acts was a coercive move, designed to drive them into factories. Read E E Thompson's fine work "The Making of The English Working Class" for a detailed look at who, how and why this process developed. One of the most striking aspects of this was the way Methodism dove-tailed with the interests of the factory owners in conditioning compliant factory workers to acceptance of their lot as good!
The first expression of this kind of schooling arose from a complete mis-understanding , and can be found in the Lancaster Schools of England. Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker, was inspired by an account written by Bell in 1797 of the Hindi system. Bell had made it clear that such a system was an effective impediment to learning, and created in it’s subjects a docility perfectly suited to mass production labour. Lancaster missed this, and concluded that it would be cheap way to awaken intellect in the lower classes. A classic case of a genuine do-gooder who missed the point completely.
Sparta : The Legend of the 300
The rest as they say is History. The History of Compulsory State Education Systems, … Do not confuse the system with the people on the ground, and their varying motivations. Like all centrally managed industrial processes the Education System depends utterly upon predictability. Predictable processes, predictable results, predictable products. And management ignore the effluent, the waste, they hide it from view, they dump it or they recycle it. They get state subsidies to deal with the waste?
Business psychology. Bullying. Quite not the exciting feel of the 'illuminati' etc etc.... Banal truth.
I would add here that the inspiration for Western Military Training came from the legendary Spartan Culture, and within that the concept of the militarisation of an entire culture was perfected. This was what drove the tiny Prussian State from near collapse, to become one of Europe's most feared fighting machines and thus a mighty Empire. That was where the first 'kindergartens' were crafted. The logic was impeccable. And it was the Prussian system that refined Compulsory State Education as we know it. It was American, French, German and English Coal and Steel Barons, and their paid Educators who were most inspired by the Prussian Military success at Waterloo.
I highly recommend J T Gatto’s work. He unveils much about the history of the project for a world wide state sponsored system of compulsory education for the masses, and it has ever since defined the nature of our society and it’s ills. Gatto's work will both shock and reward the reader many, many times.
Implications
So now that we have looked to the core inspiration, we can ask what are the implications for a natural child in a typical western school environment? Lets take a look at what happens to that child.
1. They are cut off from the real world experience, from the wider community and segregated from their parents.
2. They are forced into un-natural groupings, according to age and ‘ability’ to conform.
3. They are required to ‘learn’ what they are told to learn, which really means to memorise texts provided by the teachers, who have been given these texts by other unseen administrators of the system.
4. Failure to learn leads to punishment.
Early schooling is about learning to respond appropriately to authority. Obedience is inculcated, and becomes hard-wired in the first three years of primary school, as a direct result of' schooling'. Irrespective of how kind theteacher, how colourful the class room, the responses to authority are learned and internalised, and remain throughout the child's 'education' and into adult life. (These days the State wants your children even earlier!)
Thus the child learns that his or her own interests do not matter unless they get approval from the teachers. Their parents, having been through the same process, continue the training at home, unaware of what they are doing, innocently drawn into this process, because they are for the most part unaware of these processes.
Under these circumstances, the child will therefore of course choose an interest to follow within the scope of what is offered, this in order for the psyche to survive, and will become ever more dependent upon external approvals.
The child will have to become devious, self-limiting and reactive to external cue driven stimuli because they are expected to NOT MAKE MISTAKES, (such is the nature of rote learning) and what we know from nature is that making a mistake, observing it and correcting it, (an internal feedback loop) is an essential part of the natural learning process. Once that is disabled, then self motivated learning is all but impossible.
Conditioningand Control
All of this conditions the child in ways that make them ‘ideal’ for working in factories and bureaucracy's. Both are situations that demand a certain 'inhumanity' of the worker or clerk. Boxes must be ticked, time cards stamped, targets met. The stick is the possible loss of one's job... the carrot is 'security'. An ability to shut down key feeling centres is the core ability sought by corporations, military and police forces and bureaucracies.
The childs teachers and the childs parents have all been through and accepted this system, and this further isolates the child, for there is no-one to talk to who understands what is happening.
Those that ‘do not fit in’ or give up are then channelled towards unskilled labour or roles such as the rank and file of the military and the police. The system has a use for all.
And then finally there’s those who rebel, or those who become severely damaged by this system and thus become ‘drop-outs’ , whose chances of getting a ‘good job’ are diminished … they are demonised, and held up as a frightening example to the others.
Of course this process has varying rates of success....
Not everyone is equally effected. Some escape. Officers and Political Leaders, those who do not escape, are most often drawn from the better schools and colleges, or from a carefully screened few who work their way up the ranks, each move up being dependent upon a demonstrable willingness to comply with the directives of the system.
Meaning
In essence this is all about the control of meaning, of replacing inner meaning with received meaning, thus shutting the gate on the possibility of inner meaning arising as a threat to the established meaning. What this means is that the children develop belief systems about their abilities, about their place in society and indeed about their society itself (these beliefs are embedded in the texts of the subjects they are taught/forced to learn in school) by constant repetition. These beliefs become hard wired, neural pathways, and become a sort of ersatz identity, one that is defensive and quite resistant to alteration - held in place by fear.
And that is the nature of belief systems, state and commercial control, in a nut shell. Protest as A Safety Valve
That is why 20 million taxpaying adults will allow a Government to rip them off, time and time again, to send their sons and daughters to war, to manufacture and then drop bombs on other peoples who have been demonised in media and statements by politicians who know the depth of the conditioning, given their role in that conditioning process, all this in spite of a nagging sense that somehow it’s not right!
This is why some people will read one newspaper and others another, and they will sit in a pub, or on a TV panel, or in a Legislative Assembly and debate the issues, repeating what they have read, thinking all the time that their debates are genuinely based upon their own unique understandings and particular viewpoints, rather than share experienced knowledge culled from the wider world and information they have gleaned for themselves so as to enlighten each other. In debates, the winner takes all!
This is why people with strong beliefs are often impervious to anything that counters the basis for or adherence to those beliefs. This is why so many people fail to engage their hearts and minds with the increasingly urgent issues we are all faced with.
This is why the ‘new age’ leads to ideologues, fantasists and sectarian divides, because of this mode of reading and repeating what one has read. Original thinking is all but obliterated, and where it exists, it is limited to ‘invention’, ‘fashion’, ‘art’ and literature and corralled into a world that is carefully structured by this whole process. Thus the majority of people become mere repositories of belief.
TV and Advertising work because of this very fact.
Processed and less than optimum foods don’t help matters either.
A Violent System
What has to be understood is that this system was imposed, is still imposing itself and is inherently violent - as is the nature of the city state and industrialism as we know them. The natural child is robbed of his or her innate sensory acuity, and is practically blinded by this process, made emotionally blind because the child has to suppress his or her natural anger at this imposition in order to survive.
On top of this, parenting practices handed down over the years, from the elites, have made violence an acceptable mode of training. As Alice Miller points out a child who has been beaten or humiliated all the while being told by those they are dependent upon, those whose love they require for their own psychic development,’that this is for your own good’ must believe that admonishment, and will in turn do the same to their own children.
It was in 1998 that corporal punishment was outlawed in English Schools. At the same time, to counter that, increased testing was introduced - and we know that this increased testing has not led to an increased intellectual ability in our children. Schools were driven to meet targets in order to secure funding, and so the teachers role become that of a trainer for testing, rather than an educator. The system is designed so that tinkering with it appears to bring novel change, yet the core underlying dynamics remain in place and the power structures retain their over arching power.
This is what the various mainstream movements for peace, for liberty, for ecologically sound cultures have failed to grasp - that this conditioning permeates our society, creates a mass emotional blindness, and is the basis for all the violence of states, corporations, warlords, wifebeaters, thugs and bullies. and the tacit compliance of ordinary people. And unless unravelling this conditioning process is included in the work of these movements, up front and in yer face, it is unlikely that they will be successful.
The issues are all encapsulated in this : that the adult world manipulates the minds and hearts of children for their desires and wants, irrespective of the inherent, natural and essential psychic needs of the child.
End that condtioning, and much of the violence of states etc will vanish, as people grow up with their empathy intact, as people refuse to comply, refuse to accept the justifications and adverse behaviour of Governments, of the Military Industrial Complex, of the Establishment. End that conditioning, let the children learn as naturally as they can, and they will find the solutions - as Einstein noted "“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”" and "Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death”
Yes we can, and only we can do it!
If all this seems a bit too much or unlikely, than don't take my word for it. Explore the issues I have highlighted, do your own research, check in with your own experiences and inner sensing, and decide for yourself.
A spontaneous perfomance that attempts to frame some of these ideas for an audience
Iraq - The REAL purpose behind the Invasion, Occupation and Shock and Awe
I have just completed reading through a few books, “Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klien, “The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo and “The Age of the Warrior” by Robert Fisk.
Some heavy reading indeed as all books look at the reality behind the myth of the US/UK Governments desire to bring democracy to Iraq in the context of Global Free Trade Movement as espoused by Milton Friedman, the IMF, WTO et al.
Shock Doctrine explores the connection between torture techniques as developed from the (insane) idea of Electro Shock Therapy, Sensory Deprivation, disorientation etc and the history of Free Market Economics in South America over the past 40 years.
The policies of the IMF, WTO and the UK/US Governments have never been voted into being for one reason alone - those policies attack the very poorest, undermine workers rights and collective power, dismantle the welfare state and hand a countries resources over to ‘the market’ - those who trade in shares, commodities and currencies - in the belief, the ideology of Milton Freidman and the Chicago School, that unrestrained capitalism is the only way to enable economies to continually expand and grow.
Freidman hated the idea that a Government could control and own it’s own utilities, health system, education system etc. on behalf of its population. His belief was that all these ‘Services’ ought to be run as business enterprises in private hands as he believed that the pure self interested profit motive would be more efficient, more effective in delivering the services than the welfare motivation of Keynes. He saw Keynes as an appeaser of the working classes in the same way Tony Blair sees the Anti-war movement as appeasers of Saddam.
In South America, the experiment started with Chile and Pinochet, and continues today in Iraq, an experiment (it is an experiment!) that is as bloody and cruel as anything the Nazis ever did. Nearly 20 million have died as a direct result of these policies in South America. Many more have died in Africa, Asia. And in Europe all our public utilities have been placed in private hands, along with the bulk of our health systems, and currently our education in the process of being transferred as we speak.
Friedman knew that the only way to test out his theories was to start from a blank slate, which entailed the destruction of whatever was in place prior. He also knew that it would most likely or not take a huge shock to the system to create the conditions required. Because of course the poorest voters would never vote for these kinds of policies, and the poor in many countries make up the bulk of the electorate.
The theory of Shock Therapy and Torture is that by obliterating the patient/prisoners sense of who they are, through disorienting procedures, one arrives at a point wherein the object of the process is a blank slate, and can then be rewritten, recrafted in terms that the therapist/torturer can define. Of course the doctors believed that they were doing this for the patients own good. Or so they told themselves.
Torturers too believe in the ultimate aim of their work. So do the economists of the WTO and IMF. In fact their attachment to their belief is so strong that they ignore/deny the damage their procedures cause, and invariably lay the blame, when it appears not to work, upon the patient, prisoner or country. Comments about Arab peoples being unable to manage their affairs are frequently made by the Economists and Neo-Conservatives such as Dick Cheny, Donald Rumsfeld and others…
Iraq was invaded for two reasons. One reason is that in Iraq there is much oil. Saddams attempt in November 2002 to sell Oil in Euros, showed that he was no longer ‘Our Man’. That move had to be stopped, because the strength of the US dollar resided in it’s exclusive use as the currency for buying/selling Oil.
Furthermore, there was a distinct possibility that in time, with the potential fall of Saddam through internal Iraqi action, Iraq would become an independent democracy, like it’s neighbour Iran, and that it’s people would refuse to accept the privatisation their various branches of Government (Health. Education, Communications, Transit Systems etc etc) as required by the Global Free Trade movement.
That would place the Oil of Iraq and Iran outside the influence of the Free Trade Movement, and threatened the cosy relationship between the US/UK Government and the corrupt dictatorship of the Saudis… and it would also allow another economic model, based upon Democratic Islamic principles (which says usury is a crime), to build a base from which to compete with the Free Trade Movement (the stock exchanges of New York and London). A movement that would usurp the powers of the rich in favour of the poorest and equate to a redistribution of wealth across the board which the Global Free Trade Movement was designed to avoid. A movement that might, like the current resurgence of Indigenous South American People Power, usurp the IMF and the W|TO.
The second reason was to create the absolute shock required to re-engineer Iraqs economy.
Iraq is also a warning, that after 40 years of Free Market Economic Expansion through covert means, that now the gloves were off and that the UK/US Governments were openly prepared to go to War (ignore the pretexts you have read about) to ensure that The Free Market would dominate the economies of the Globe.
Governmental Robbery nothing less. Tony Blair is a War Criminal, yet he is also an economic gangster, as was Thatcher, Major and as is Brown.
I highly recommend this book - it’s easy to read, her prose is excellent and what she reveals is essential for activists and concerned citizens to know and understand. Only when you know what has been done can you make changes towards health. http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
