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.
Showing posts with label all war is child abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label all war is child abuse. Show all posts
Mairead Corrigan did more for freedom from oppression in 25 years than the IRA did in it's entire history.
Taking on the Bully Cult is profoundly challenging:
it’s really scary for anyone to look and see what is there, without blinkers, on a number of levels:
- the horror (full realisation)
- the grief (loss of innocence)
- the fear (personally at risk)
- the impact of knowing means one must take action (response ability)
- loneliness (because we are so atomised culturally)
- the selfish rage (why me?)
- the despair (this is hopeless)
Russian military action in Ukraine is a war crime. Blatantly. Set aside the history, the many dynamics that lead up to this shituation. The Act of Aggression is the supreme war crime, in that it includes all other possible crimes of war, for they are derived from that one act.
At the same time, as I sit here, in total safety, in London watching news reports of Western Media as reporters breathlessly, excitedly chatting shit, broadcasting 'live' from the scene, not from the battle field itself, but at a safe distance, viewing those reports gives me the chills.
Guns handed out from the back of rubbish lorries as grassroots resistance to the war started by Russia's Vladimir Putin begins.
18,000 rifles and magazines, for a city of 2,962,180 souls.
How long will those magazines last, how many of those men and women will survive their first encounter with a professional army trained in city fighting? Who thought this a good idea?
It's not glory, it is gore.
Russian forces should not be in Ukraine, they are illegal, amoral and wrong on every level. No question.
Reporters from a wide range of international News Services, wearing helmets and flak jackets, talking to Ukrainians, sticking microphones into their faces, asking them if they will pick up weapons and fight gives me the chills.
When the war arrives to that city, those reporters will quickly leave. When the long fight, the attrition continues, they will be long gone.
Reading that Ukrainian border guards are stopping all fighting age men from leaving, pulling them out of cars and groups fleeing west, towards Europe, as refugees and thinking what of their partners, their children, their grandparents, their freedom, their human rights? I think they have every right to flee, to not get involved in violence they did nothing to instigate, other than be born there. I am appalled.
Ukraine and Russia both have large contingents of conscripts already. That is a most fundamental breach of Human Rights. Israel has a similar mandatory service policy. Conscription is inhumane, and a pox upon the people.
A question?
I ask myself - would this breathless reporting and questioning, this encouragement of citizens to take up arms in news reports have been happening in Afghanistan, in 2002, or in Iraq, 2003, or in Yemen, 2011, or in Libya, 2019 or in Syria, 2012 where sovereign states were being attacked by foreign militia, foreign mechanised military and foreign air forces? Would the worlds media have been so excitedly egging those citizens on?
Imagine a BBC reporter asking an Iraqi citizen in March 2003 - "Hamed, habibi, will you and your sons be taking up weapons to defend your country?"
And what is the result of untrained citizens taking up weapons?
How much more bloodshed is caused?
Who pours money and weapons and logistics into wars to extend them?
Since 1900, there has only been a single year without a British operational military casualty. This is a chronology of Britain's military interventions since 1945. Know your enemy. They may be closer than you think.
Nobody wins a war, people survive, mostly due to luck.
And what is life like for the survivors?
And why is militarism still a thing in the 21st Century?
And is it so amongst ordinary citizens who really ought to know better partly because war movies are carefully presented as entertaining, beguiling lies that glorify 'good' violence, that mix extreme violence with sex and love and patriotism, and manipulative emotional hook lines, but leave out the stench of death, the smells of piss, shit, puke, blood, decaying gore, gunpowder and old burned out buildings?
My first rule of 'Fight Club' is everyone in Fight Club is stupid - that's why they don't want to talk about it, honestly. They do like to brag about it, amongst themselves.
Militarism is a pox, a blight, an inhumane machine, a gross psychopathy institutionalised. Funded by our taxes. The very origin of income tax was to fund a war.
What do we all lose, in every war?
What have we ever gained?
Russia is not Putin, and Putin is not working on his own. Neither is England Blair, and Blair was not working on his own. Neither is Assad Syria, nor was he working on his own. America is not George Bush and Dick Cheny, and they were not working on their own.
From the safety of these islands, the British Empire wrought war, harm and vengeance across this beautiful Earth in pursuit of Wealth Extraction.
Are we not sick of this?
I am. I am appalled.
Russian warfare against Ukraine must be stopped.
All warfare must be stopped.
Otherwise it's going to continue.
And of course there's the ever present threat of Nuclear War.
Ira Helfand, MD is co-President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. As co-Founder and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, IPPNW’s US affiliate, he knows terrible truths about nuclear war.
Ira uncovers the threat to human survival posed by nuclear weapons and what we can do to eliminate this threat. Dangers of nuclear war exist as an existential threat to humanity. There's circa 15,000 Nuclear Nuclear War Heads owned by nine States.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
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The within all studied Hierarchy of Power Cultures the lived experience of child abuse is more common than rare. This is a true statement - a significant portion of our population, generation after generation, in homes, schools, institutions and in the community, experience chronic abuse as children, and many people as adults live with a constant background of abuse.
Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia, Structural Poverty, Able-ism and other layered socially instituted generic hatreds are very much common behavioural characteristics of this culture into which I was born.
When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions we discover something.
Egalitarian life was generally peaceful, beautiful, healthy, grounded in solid attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduced incidence of lost tempers and general violence
.
This will trigger some people within a culture where self regulation is dysregulated more often than not.
Those abusive behaviours are exceedingly rare and more usually unknown in healthyegalitarianpre-conquest cultures. They do emerge in previously egalitarian cultures post conquest, as an outcome of the trauma of collision with conquest, hierarchy cultures.
These abuse behaviours are common to all Hierarchy cultures, apart from Racism which is specific to Euro-Christian White Colonial Slavery Culture and which persists to this day. "White People did not exist before 1681!"
This chart reflects the compilation and statistical analysis of a wide ranging surveys of many hundreds of different cultures that looks at a spectrum of behaviour from Egalitarian to Hierarchically Violent. A key variant that is found to be a predictor of the nature of any given culture is the way the culture relates to children.
This chart, prepared by James Prescott, is in large part drawn from the work of Robert B Textor in "A Cross Cultural Summary"
"It presents a series of some 20,000 statements, grouped according to a list of standard cultural categories, that describe which of a large number of variables (all more or less conventionally dichotomized) are associated beyond chance expectations with which other dichotomous variables, in the 400-culture sample assembled by George P. Murdock for the Ethnographic Atlas.
The variables examined and intercorrelated in this largely computer-written survey are all those employed in 38 published or completed cross-cultural studies, plus those that have been coded for the Ethnographic Atlas.
The volume is, I would say, easy to use. The compiler has carefully and explicitly described all of his procedural decisions, as well as providing a brief but thoughtful introduction to some of the principles of statistical cross-cultural research.
In short, as Harold Driver says in a dust jacket blurb: “There is no longer any excuse for tossing around unconfirmed and impressionistic generalizations, when thousands of sound propositions, based on world-wide samples, are now available in this impressive compilation.’’
I would put this injunction even more strongly: any ethnologist who assumes a correlation between two variables that have already been the subjects of cross-cultural study will henceforth be professionally remiss if he does not check his assumption in the pages of this volume.
But useful as such checks will be, particularly to exploratory comparative studies, the reader of this volume should remember that failure to find statistical support for some assumed causal relationship does not necessarily mean he should abandon his assumption."
Review by Melvin Ember, Hunter College, in American Anthropologist 1969 p.918
In other words, this is a serious compilation and survey of cultural characteristics. The charts are accurate representations of social or cultural behavioural characteristics. This is solid, grounded evidence.
The recent work of Robert Sapolsky, Behave : Humans at our worst and best and previous work by E. Richard Sorenson from the bookTribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropologyand the work of Allan Schore in the neuroscience of emotional self regulation and development in the first two years of life, all confirm this overview - the default state of the human species is trust, we are egalitarian by our evolutionary development. There are many others whose work confirms this thesis.
The following assertion is no longer in the realm of hypothesis.
Our Human bodies, brains and minds are perfectly evolved for love, connection, trust, creativity, bonding, healthy attachment with grounded individual autonomy, as a core part of a functional collectivist socially nurturing dynamic, not in spite of it.
Because we are evolved to adapt to a wide range of habitats, and because we are as infants sensitive and vulnerable, and thus ready to learn about our new world, it is the case we must learn the behaviours that function best within the egalitarian trust default state, from our parents, siblings and wider community without direct instruction, (our brains are evolved to learn by experience, rather than being genetically programmed to generate behaviour) and it is the case that these fundamentals are distorted by childhood trauma that remains unresolved and/or chronic stress that afflicts a culture that persists over generations.
Back to the future, here and now...
Child abuse statistics for England and Wales in 2019
Just a quick glance at the statistics in England and Wales, for example, reveals the following :
Of the 6,971 convictions for child abuse-flagged cases in the latest year:
81% (5,668) entered a guilty plea
19% (1,301) were convicted after trial
fewer than 1% (two) were proved in absence
Around one in five (21%) child abuse-flagged prosecutions in the latest year were unsuccessful in securing a conviction, equating to 1,843 prosecutions.
To put that that into a more informal perspective, if the details of each conviction were read out in the daily 6pm News, it would average out at 19 cases per day, 365 days of the year. That would jump to 25 a day, for a 5 day working week. A further 20% of cases do not achieve a conviction - that is not to say the defendant was acquitted, proven innocent. One in twenty cases reported lead to a charge, or summons. Even that sorry statistic does not cover the full extent of abuse of children across England and Wales.
In 2019 a total of "around 227,500 identifiable child abuse offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019. It is important to note that some of these offences occurred more than a year ago. For example, where data were available from the Home Office Data Hub, 34% of sexual offences against children recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019 occurred one year or more ago. This includes 21% of cases which occurred 10 years or more ago."
Comments by one of the statisticians add weight to the assertion that child abuse is more common than rare across this culture.
"By its very nature, child abuse is often hidden from view and many cases don’t come to the attention of the police or the courts. Of identifiable child abuse offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019, 1 in 25 resulted in a charge or summons. Of cases that did lead to a prosecution, 4 in 5 resulted in a conviction. We see similar trends in figures for sexual offences. Of course, both crimes are particularly sensitive in nature and some have occurred a long time in the past making them more challenging to investigate.” Meghan Elkin, Centre for Crime and Justice, Office for National Statistics
Add to these crimes of abuse against children, violence perpetrated against women and other instances of violence between adults that litter our newspapers, fill our courts and cause immense distress. One in five school children in English Schools reported being bullied on school premises in surveys carried out in 2018 - 2019. The bullying follows the vulnerable online at a similar rate. Rape and sexual harassment are background threats every women is aware of.
Clearly we have a problem that is being experienced at the cultural level, rather than being a question of few bad apples.
Adverse Outcomes for Survivors
I am a survivor of protracted severe childhood abuse and bullying by adults and other children. In my adult life I have endured poverty, destitution, loss, depression and severe psychological distress. This is typical for many of the people who have endured childhood abuse, bullying and other adverse situations.
I have to and do take a certain amount of responsibility for the choices I have made, the errors I have made, the flaws in my behaviour and attitudes - nonetheless, the larger part of my distress was caused to me by others, and exacerbated by the lack of supportive or protective structures within this culture.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones.
The trauma of war is caused by a few who launch the war, and the many who endure do so under the greatest of strains, and largely do so unreported, whereas the people agencies that initiate and prosecute war have daily headlines to urge their case.
"Given the situation I was born into, the culture and society as it is set up and everything that I experienced, the things that should have happened that did not, and the things that should not have happened that did, it is no wonder I feel the way I do."
In the process of getting through all of that I have spent a lot of time examining my own life. I could say that I was trying to put together the pieces that were broken, reclaim the parts of me that I had lost. I have been on a journey survival, a path of self directed learning about myself, in this life, in this culture, for 40 years. I am 61 years old.
My gradual understanding of and the integration of my lived experience has been buoyed up the many decent kind people I have met along the way. In spite of the culture, most people are pretty decent and I have been fortunate to meet mostly decent people, and to have siblings whose love and kindness have helped me weather the storms of my life. time and time again.
My study has ranged over many subjects including biology, history, geography, anthropology, paleology, neuroscience, endocrinology, biochemistry, economics, studies of civilisations, technology, the history of writing, architecture, agriculture, horticulture, permaculture, behavioural psychology, evolutionary psychology, war fare, medicine, child development, trauma studies, linguistics, religions, shamanism, animism, power relationships, herbalism and music and more..
I have been taken in by a number of cults, and have assumed entire belief systems and lived those until I inevitably came to a point where the real world evidence undermines some aspect of the belief, and I am forced to drop the belief, and return to a confusing, painful reality, sometimes with a bump, sometimes with the greatest sense of relief and liberation.
In the end we all seek liberation from oppressive situations that dominate our lives.
Freedom is not as some would have it taking the liberty to do as one wants, not least as others around us suffer - freedom exists only in entire populations not being oppressed, bullied, hated, shot at, bombed from the air, impoverished, poisoned or polluted by agencies and powers far greater than the individual, greater even than the communities we all live within.
Underscoring that peace is more than just the absence of war, United Nations officials stressed the need for concerted efforts to achieve the common vision of a life of dignity and well-being for all.
“We know that peace cannot be decreed solely through treaties – it must be nurtured through the dignity, rights and capacities of every man and woman,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks to the High-level Forum on the Culture of Peace, convened by the General Assembly. “It is a way of being, of interacting with others, of living on this planet.”
In September 1999, the Assembly adopted, by consensus, a resolution on the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. Since then, it has met annually to discuss the issue, as well as how to advance this noble goal.
Mr. Ban said that peace means access to education, health and essential services – especially for girls and women; giving every young woman and man the chance to live as they choose; and developing sustainably and protecting the planet’s biodiversity."
My 40 years of enquiry, of honest effort and exploration of this lived experience, which we all share, for better or for worse, has taught me much.
Delivering remarks on behalf of Assembly President John Ashe, Vice-President Isabelle F. Picco said the desire for a culture of peace knows no boundaries and is inherent in the hearts of all people.
“It transcends gender, culture, religion, faith and belief, and unites the rich and poor, the old and young, East and West, North and South around a common desire.”
She added that the post-2015 development agenda that Member States are currently working on must be rooted in a culture of peace.
“Peace as an overarching theme must be woven throughout the goals and underpin the targets,” Ms. Picco stated. “And our new agenda must be backed by the political will, commitment, partnerships and financial support to help usher in a new era of peace on a global level.”
This culture - Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture - is an unhealthy culture.
The invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the polluting of our air with exhaust particulates that find their way into our beloved babies wombs are all adverse outcomes of absolutely unhealthy behaviour.
Abuse on a colossal scale.
The Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture can be described as a complex post traumatic stressed disordered culture, as a hierarchy of violence and power culture, and as a trauma generating culture that normalises aspects of unresolved post trauma coping mechanisms as normative behaviour. It is a culture that sustains unresolved trauma as part of its internal engine and it's lurid mythos. The Gods as they are portrayed, behave like vengeful anti-social bullies. They are very much alike human beings with more power than they can safely handle. They are, of course, projections of the bully mind and culture.
One might well say it is an un-natural culture. No baby is born to become a bully, nor is any baby born to be bullied. Bullying is a distorted behaviour that distorts those who are bullied in turn. Chronic stress imposed by the presence of bullying absolutely undermines the natural default development of children and adults.
Allan Schore on the evolutionary biology and psychology of emotional self regulation as it develops.
We are by our evolutionary default egalitarian, bonded, securely attached, empathic sensitive beings/creatures who live as social puppies, in loving relationships that are able to weather the variations of a changing and dynamic habitat. This is our evolutionary default.
Snow blizzards, rain storms, sunny droughts, day or night, floods, tsunami's, volcanoes and general natural changes and so on - when we survive we survive largely because of luck and because of our attachment to one another, our intelligence and quick wits, our creativity and our fraternity.
This is proven to some extent by the story of the Aboriginal people's of Australia, 80,000 years of continued thriving communities. It is the oldest narrative of the human species. Pre-historical. And there remains a core of Aboriginal people who live in those old ways, who retain the social behavioural characteristics of the healthy human culture, in spite of oppression and the conquest culture's denial of their validity. Indeed there are an estimated population of 360 million indigenous, undeveloped people's across Earth and they are all at risk of extinction entirely due to this culture I was born into.
Our default is trust. until we are subjected to chronic traumatising stressors. Then everything becomes distorted. This is the historical narrative. I have written about this before, outlining a theory that the Hierarchy culture is the result of an egalitarian culture that was traumatised, and for what ever reasons, was unable to resolve the trauma, and remained in fight or flight reactive mode which engendered normalising controlling behaviour patterns.
Our problem of healing is not an evolutionary problem - we are more highly evolved for good health and love than anything else.
Our problem of healing is not a matter of personal flaws and failings.
Our problem of healing is a cultural problem.
David Smail in his book "The origins of Unhappiness : a new understanding of personal distress" -
"It is the main argument of this book that emotional and psychological distress is often brought about through the operation of social-environmental powers which have their origin at a considerable distance from those ultimately subjected to them.
On the whole, psychology has concerned itself very little with the field of power which stretches beyond our immediate relations with each other, and this has led to serious limitations on the explanatory power of the theories it has produced.
To illustrate this, typical cases of patient distress in the 1980s are examined. The decade when the right-wing of politics proclaimed there was no such thing as society gave rise to psychological distress across social classes, as long-standing societal institutions were dismantled.
This is as much a work of sociology, politics, and philosophy, as it is of psychology. Fundamentals of an environmental understanding of distress are outlined. A person is the interaction of a body with the environment."
In other words, David Smail understood that the impact of the behaviour of those who wield immense institutional and material power upon those who do not amounts to a disparity such that decisions that cause grevious harm to entire populations are made, with dreadful frequency, and little accountability.
No wonder people are distressed.
As I like to put it "Given the kind of family, community and culture I was born into, and everything that happened to me, it is no wonder that I feel the way I do."
Another way to put it is to say that a lot of human distress is often the outcome of things that should have happened not happening and things that should not have happened, happening - by agency of other human beings.
The Fruedian and Jungian Psychiatric and Psychoanalytical models are all deflections from this fundamental observation. There are no archetypes of abusive or distressed behaviour lying dormant within the human psyche. There is no genetic disposition to distress, other than we all suffer when we are chronically bullied, and that chronic state can trigger epigentic changes that alter our biology, that can throw it out of balance.
There is nothing 'wrong' with the person, there are only distressed persons and a distorting culture within which the person is forced to live, a culture that is very distressing.
Robert Sapolsky in "Behave : The Biology of Humans at our best and our worst"
“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you.
Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.”
It all comes down to culture, in the end.
Sapolsky writes “culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means."
A Hierarchy of Violence culture is a behavioural dynamic, not a genetic dynamic.
We need to abolish poverty and end war as a priority for the mental health and physiological well being of Humanity, and that must include a cessation of all invasion of lands occupied by older indigenous cultures, as the essential preparatory steps, even before we approach the issues of pollution, environment and climate change.
"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."
It is also a song.
I try to 'remember' aware that I am placed within an historical context, a point between what has happened and what will happen, in the present, the place of happening, which is here and now.
I am aware I am here because so many organisms have lived, nurtured and died.
We are all here as a result of the evolution of living systems.
And in this time, Remembrance Sunday in particular, I turn towards every ancestor ever murdered in warfare, every family bombed out of their home, every child shot in the back in flight, the terror, the pain, the loss, the grief, the disgust, the shame, the guilt, the denial, the survival, the hatred and so much else that has distorted human lives down through the wounded generations across the Earths lived in spaces, everywhere, for all time, the remembered and the forgotten.
All of that vast lived experience of terror, pain, shock, disgust.
It's a lot of peoples lives totally fucked up beyond all recognition.
It's real. It is not abstract.
I allow myself to begin to imagine the terror, the feeling, the sense of going through all of that, and I am already shattered, momentarily. This is terrifying, when I really allow it in. It is also huge - an immense sadness, grief and dismay beyond all comprehension.
I am glad that I am only imagining, that for me this is a kind of mental and emotional thought feeling experiment.
I imagine that then multiplied million upon million fold, ordinary folk caught up in the wars of the powerful, as in WWI and WWII, the wars of colonial conquest, of indigenous annihilation.
The survivors PTSD interwoven with trying to make ends meet as a slave, an indentured worker, a beggar, a low wage worker-labourer, a shopkeeper, a cobbler, a doctor, whatever.
I think about how that trauma and poverty 'informed' or conditioned all those lives of the centuries of warfare, and in relation to my own immediate ancestors in Ireland during the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s
Traumatised parents doing their best, yet passing on the woundedness, the loss, the behavioural dynamics on unresolved trauma.
I try to see through to the ripples of effect and affect. I try to see how all of that ripples through to today, how it afflicts the present, from 100 years ago and more, millennia of war fare.
15,000 years of Civilisation and Warfare.
And the thing is this - go back 30,000 years or 60,000 years and we see very, very little evidence of any Monumental Institutional Culture, now evidence of any Hierarchy of Violence Culture.
Kings, Palaces, Pyramids all unknown.
We know that outside the areas of 'civilisation' the vast majority of sustained cultures were egalitarian cultures built for conflict resolution, de-escalation of aggression, carrying on trade.
We know that nomadic, migratory, pastoral, horticultural, fisher-hunter-gatherers in the large part maintained healthy attachment bonding between mother and child - social cultures where nurture is highly valued, more valued than power.
War is a culture, rather than a sequence of discrete events innate to human nature.
WWI cannot be studied within it's start and finish timelines and be understood.
It was another ripple in the culture of competing militarised industrialised states - the rights and wrongs of WWI are a gaslighting exercise. The issue is the culture of warfare as a political utility, which itself emerges from hierarchy of violence culture - God the wrathful, who loves you, The Murderous State that will punish you, the dominant all powerful parent.
Ending the warfare culture is the work of all honest, free adults.
Human Welfare is our business here, not Warfare.
There was no sacrifice, nothing was won, the bland lies of polished brass, marching to order, wreaths and ceremony are in truth a private memorial attended by some few loyal Survivors, co-opted by the Chiefs of Staff and their political masters for political advantage.
Let me clarify.
The people who lived through the combat and destruction have a fraternal duty and a human need to remember, to bear witness to what happened, to grieve, to cry, to stand in stoic grace and to somehow integrate their experience, and be held, lovingly.
They also need full support to deal with their wounds, they deserve help in every possible way no questions asked. They rarely receive this because to acknowledge these wounds fully would be to expose the mythos of war as a sham.
And most of all they need the civilians to ensure that the politicians never, ever send future generations to go to war off shore.
I wear both poppies, and none.
I cannot dismiss the survivors of warfare on any side, their wounds are real, and they are victimised by those who urge warfare, by those who glorify warfare in order to condition others to habituate to warfare.
"Peace is more than the absence of War." - Arandhuti Roy
War is only possible if a culture permits child abuse.
It requires an organisational effort to prepare children for the eventuality of war.
Indoctrination is pretty central to the successful prosecution of warfare,and enforcement of conquest, and ought be understood as a grooming behaviour that has been institutionalised, weaponized and deployed, in effect if not always on concert.
All war is child abuse, child abuse is war.
The vast resources deflected away from nurturing happy healthy families, safe communities and thus functionally sound societies deprives every child of those societies, and is a form of indirect child abuse.
The training of youngsters to become combat troops, to become something that they can have no experience of; the deliberate, methodical organised killing of warfare, and it's disorganisation in the field.
They have to break the youngster and rebuild, re-condition and in effect brain wash that youngster as part of a group going through the same abusive training that it's their togetherness that matters, so they all push through, as a habit, as an emotional reaction.
This is typically done between age 16 and 22 whilst the frontal cortex of the brain is still developing, whilst the young persons brain is still vulnerable to adverse environmental influence.
."probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the
delayed maturation of the frontal cortex—the genetic programming for the
young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions,
to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms.
To hark
back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn’t take a
particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a
punch.
But it takes a fancy, environmentally malleable frontal cortex to
learn culture-specific rules about when it’s okay to throw punches.”
―
Robert M. Sapolsky,
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Talking to children about Heaven and Hell is terrorism, if you can see it honestly, for what it is, without judgement, as a anti-biological cultural behaviour pattern.
To insert into the child's mind the existential fear of his or her own 'soul', or 'self' based on a fable through reward/sanction behaviour modification dynamics that internalise the external values into the child so that the child believes those values to be his or her own.
Terror, fear and Hope.
Look at it that way and then the behaviour can be addressed.
It's again the pattern of intruding into the child's psyche.
Colonialism.
"We do not need to shape our children, rather we need to respond to who they are."
The fear the child will not choose the Religion or System on their own is great, and is a reflection of the insecurity of all dogma, all doctrine, all religious zeal and practice.
Same thing, different appearance.
Healthy people do not go to war.
And so it goes..
The culture routinely, and understandably, ignores the meaning of the harms caused - we avoid the intensity and intimacy of each act of violence, each death moment is masked out.
They lost their lives is uttered rather than they were murdered for political power.
Yet each thing like that existed, and they continue to exist, and there is no balance, no resolution to that death. We cannot claw back the life that has been utterly destroyed.
Thus the historians and school masters utter numbers, statistics, miles gained or lost, and they speak of generals, and heroes, and the villages in between are invisible - the deaths are less than notable.
Just numbers. Just numb.
And so the war habituated people will quote such information in repetition, having 'learned' the official narrative, euphemism to mask the immensity of individual suffering, repeated in unspeakable intensity, by the millions, re-presented as historical sentiment via caricature that brings tears to the eyes, the emotions of national sacrifice so carefully tended.
That's a big ask to feel into that immense well of pain, grief, desperation, it's so much easier to take the heroic stance.
But we need to feel into that to really understand why in a fully embodied sense we must cease our states engaging in warfare.
Hence my latest release* - All War is Child Abuse.
*See and hear above!
My argument is simple.
The indoctrination that is central to the prosecution of War is child abuse.
Organised, Institutional invasive psychological grooming to exploit that child-adult for violent political activism - that's what soldiers are.
They are the tactical violent utility of the ruling class.
They wage war for political masters.
The waste of materials and wealth and human time, from extraction industries, to weapons makers, then the destruction wrought by warfare consumables 'market' - all of it is global child abuse.
I get that many millions of folk have lived experience of this in ways i do not, in ways I would never want to experience and that I am not 'expert' here...
I am looking at all the elements and I find nothing that exists that balances the harms experienced.
Nothing.
Nothing in war that I would 'endure' to serve Humanity. Nothing I would ask any other to bear to 'save' Humanity...
It's bullshit to claim there is glory, goodness, heroism, sacrifice in war - those are all after the fact rationalisations or pre-fight fantasies.
The exploitation of the hyper-adrenalenised traumatised wounded survivors trying to make sense of it all.
Nobody wins war. As I understand it 'losses' in war are in fact the numbers of people murdered by a system of power, be they troop or civilian, adult or child, volunteer or conscript.
Murders, not losses.
Losses to the organising agencies, whose concern with numbers of troops is rather obvious.
To
go after troops who murdered people in Iraq and to avoid going after
the men who organised and funded and prosecuted an invasion and war
against another state?
That is an appalling act of deliberate hypocrisy, because that failure to indict known War Criminals is part of what enables War Makers to get away with it. They never go to jail.
Colonialism and Conquest.
I find it appalling
that the majority of Europeans cannot 'see' what Colonialism
really costed, and still costs,
How can they not understand that a cruel dynamic generated the wealth and status we Europeans now stand on, which we were born into,
I find it appalling that we British are not strong enough to arrest our White European Christian
War Criminals.
Blair is free and that indicts the entire Western European polity, straight up.
Bush is free, and that indicts the entire Industrial World. Straight up.
I say this - We remember and we must prevent or it is just nostalgia and cover-up, which is very, very stinky evil.
Go on, then, televise and broadcast the old men of 'yesterdays wars' tearing up, the young men in fresh uniform, the disabled veterans, the bugle, the wind, the seriousness of the moment, the standing, lots of standing.
But if they go to war tomorrow, if we allow our Government to go to war, if we permit venal men and women to fund covert warfare, to supply active combatants in illegal Wars, in effect spreading violence, then it's just a load of political grooming gangsterism.
Just for the show.
It's not a good show.
Remember that as you go.
Remembrance.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.
