Troop Morale, Overstretch and Spin.... truth is truth!

Recent media reports state that at least half of all enlisted personnel in the UK Military are considering leaving.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1033922/Half-troops-want-quit-armed-forces-fighting-fronts-takes-toll.html

According to the reports this is due to ‘overstretch’.

The UK has around 4000 troops in Iraq, and 8000 in Afghanistan.

The total UK Military is around 150,000. Which means that at any one time there close to 10% of the UK Military is on active combat duty. With three shifts, we might extrapolate that 30% of the Military is on rotation. We know that nearly 90% of all military and reserves have served in Iraq or Afghanistan at one time or another. (my figures are approximate!)

During world war II that percentage was way higher, as were the overall numbers of military personnel. And of course the numbers of dead, wounded and traumatised were also higher. Yet very few ever thought to quitting. Morale was never so low.

Which begs the question : Are these reports correct in their assumption that ‘overstretch’ is the core issue?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that assumption is incorrect, and amounts to yet another ‘sexing up’, a spin on the situation designed to deflect attention from the core problem faced by UK troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These wars are illegal. They are also morally wrong.

The brutality that troops almost inevitably bring to their ‘work’ in Iraq and Afghanistan is mostly situational - troops have no clearly defined, uniformed enemy, and must follow orders, even if those orders are illegal, in order to protect themselves and each other. (mutiny on the battlefield is fatal to all concerned as it leads towards vulnerability and chaos)

Once that brutality line is crossed, it is exceedingly difficult to work back towards the original premise - that these wars were about bringing peace and democracy, that there is a clearly defined enemy or an end in sight.

Add to that the blatant profiteering of those who initiated these wars, which is now next to near common knowledge (if not in detail, then in essence), and one begins to see that it is impossible for troops to continue. Better ‘equipment’, better pay will not make the difference. The Emperors nakedness is exposed and no amount of veiling will hide the fact.

What to do?

As a civilian who has great respect for those who do place their lives on the line, who undertake this most dangerous of ‘work’ out of a sense of honour, a sense of patriotism, a sense of wanting to give to the greater whole of society, I suggest the following :

Read the information placed on the www.makewarshistory.org.uk website regarding the Laws Prohibiting War.

http://www.makewarshistory.org.uk/mwh/2008/06/laws-prohibitin.html

Understand these laws, for they easy to understand, they are simple, they are clear.

Then, report the war crimes to your local police station, and demand that those who initiated these wars are held to account, demand that our troops be returned home immediately and give warm support all those troops who wish to no longer follow illegal (and immoral) orders.

Read the letter concerning the payment of taxes to the UK Central Government, and withold your taxes until the above is done.

http://www.makewarshistory.org.uk/mwh/2008/06/paye-letter.html

Do this to protect and honour our troops, and to protect the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, to enable them to decide their own future without interference from outsiders whose agenda is fundamentally one of greed - pipelines and the oil that flows through them. Privatised Downsized State Functions and the profits that accrue.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part5/chapter14

Do this to honour all those who have died or have been injured or have been traumatised, do this to start the process of healing.

Do this because YOU are a promoter of peace, even if your Government is not.

Further action appropriate would be to strip all those who have profited from these wars of all their financial assets, and hand that cash back to those who really, truly need it.

Demand that Halliburton and Bechtel, Lockheed Martin and Northrupp Grumann, JP Morgan and BP/Amoco et al return to Iraq and Afghanistan to repair the damage they have caused (much in the manner we request young offenders to do community work for petty crimes) and that they return their ill gained profits to those they have so horribly ripped off…. at their own expense, and by employing Afghan and Iraq workers at reasonable wages, in the process of the reconstruction of their villages, towns cities and infrastructure.

I would dearly like to see Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Dick Cheny, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush labouring repairing broken sewers in Baghdad as part of their penance.

And when all of this is done, then let us then say with some authority that “we stand for peace, for democracy, for peoples freedom, everywhere”.

Anything less than that is merely insult added to injury, death and trauma..

Try my songs on reverbnation (see the player on the top right of this page.) play them while doing all of the above!


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

The Function of Education : why we failed to stop the English Government prosecuting the Iraq War

As I edit this in England in 2021 and I observe head teachers and teachers willingly exposing the children in their care to a dangerous pathogen, after 20 months of pandemic, with no end in sight, with layers of command responsibility and culpability going all the way up to Parliament as a whole body, and the Government and 'Opposition' within it, all of them educated in their own time by the compulsion methodology and ideology, this rather badly typed (in the original form, when I was still dealing with serious issues within myself, or rather barely coping to be more honest) short piece is germaine.

"free yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds" ~ Bob Marley

"Education! Education! Education!" ~ Tony Blair

Why was it that millions upon millions of English people were unable to stop a few thousand English Ruling Class from initiating and persecuting an amoral, illegal war? 

I think it all boils down the the function of Compulsory State Education.

Below is an excerpt from an article that explores what is most likely the hidden agenda of Compulsory (note that word) State Education (no child left behind) - its utility as a political inhibitor, designed to thwart emergent democratic organisation that might dislodge the established power groups from their dominating positions.

Compulsory - coerced education - is not what we are led to believe...

 from : http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm 

"The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. 

William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.

That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. 

But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable." 

 It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. 

Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. 

Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. 

A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary." 

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. 

Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier: 

  1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. 

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. 

  3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one. 

  4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. 

  5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. 

  6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor. 

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. 

And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. 

Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. 

In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. "

These words were written by John Taylor Gatto. They are accurate. They describe a fundamental reality that exists underneath and in spite of the many reforms in education, year after year,

Now you know why 30 million adults cannot stop a few thousand launching a war. 

Question is what can we do about it? 

Kindest regards 

Corneilius 

 Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Make Wars History! Iraq and War Law.

Not many people are aware that under existing UK Law (The International Criminal Court Act 2001 ) and International Law, those being :

i The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War 1928 [The Kellogg-Briand Pact].

ii The United Nations Charter 1945.

iii The Geneva Conventions 1948,

iv The UN Charter 1945,

v The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948.

vi The Nuremburg Principles 1950.

vii the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court 1998.

viii Article 25 The Manual of Military Law.

IX The International Criminal Court Act 2001

the UK Government is engaged in, and is criminally liable for the illegal wars in iraq and Afghanistan that are wars of aggression, the supreme crime against humanity, under the Nurumberg Principles.

The UK Government is also in breach of the Kellog-Briand Pact and the other laws quoted above.

It has not, and never had, ANY AUTHORITY under the UN Charter to engage in this war.

The UK Government in 1998 ratified The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and in 2001 enacted The International Criminal Court Act 2001.

This means that all those who were instrumental in planning and issuing the orders that caused the war to happen, and all who enable it to continue, can be tried before the ICC at the Hague as war criminals and can be arrested in the UK so that they may appear before the ICC to answer the charges.

It is the duty of every UK citizen to report this crime to the Police, that they might arrest those responsible.

Furthermore it is illegal tp pay taxes that support in any way any government that is committing a war crime.

It is therefore the DUTY of British Citizens to do what they can, under Law, to stop those crimes being committed.

To not do so makes each citizen, once they are aware of the Law, an ancilliary to a war crime.

Chris Coverdale and his team have done the research and have outlined the legal status of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have collated the relevant information for your use at :

http://www.makewarshistory.org.uk

I urge you to review this information and to then report the crime at your local Police Station. You will be given a crime number, and at a later date, you will be interviewed so that you can detail the charges. The police are legally bound to investigate any reported crime.

I urge you also to refuse to pay any taxes to the Government, until such time as the war crimes are no longer being committed in your name with your taxes.

The procedure for both these actions is quite simple and more info can be found at their website.

The law is enforceable only by you and I, the citizens of the UK, none other. These laws exist and are fully functioning only when we exercise our will to see those laws upheld and enforced.

If your local MP, Peer etc has supported the War, then you can name them as particular war criminals. If we the people can indict and prosecute even one MP, then we can do do so for all those who are war criminals.

This is the only way we can stop wars.

By having those war criminals arrested and by refusing to fund the war through our taxation.

It can be done.

YOU CAN DO IT!

Together we can uphold and enforce the Law and bring the wars to an end.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Illegal Wars and your Taxes!

Campaign to Make Wars History

If you are tax payer in the UK then you have been, without your consent and probably your awareness, supporting the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More so if you voted for any of the candidate MPs who arranged the wars, who sat in Parliament and cote to continue to prosecute the wars, or who voted against War Crimes investigations.

Given the existence in English Law of the International Criminal Court Act 2001, and in particular, sections 51 and 52 of that act the prosecution of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, by UK Military at the behest of UK Government, is an act of genocide and a war-crime, under English Law. What the ICC Act 2001 does is integrate the ICC into English Law, whereby a War Criminal can be investigated,  indicted in England, and arrested and handed over to the ICC at the Hague for trial.

However, there's a lot of resistance to such moves being made. You see, Blair is not the only one, and a full accounting for these Wars of Aggression would scoop up a good few thousand people across the Establishment. In my mind that would be a very good thing to achieve, and would lend itself to removing US Nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction from UK Soil and Waters, and edge the global community closer to a more peaceful world. A demilitarised Britain would be a fine example to other nations populations to take action to end Militarism, which is a pox upon all our lives.

International Criminal Court Act 2001 : The text

International Criminal Court Act 2001 : Section 51,52

Under these same statutes, it is also a war-crime to assist in any way the continued commission of these crimes.

The term 'ancillary to the commission of a crime' has the following definitions:

"PART 5 Offences under Domestic Law

England and Wales

55 Meaning of “ancillary offence”

(1) References in this Part to an ancillary offence under the law of England and Wales are to—

(a) aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the commission of an offence,

(b) inciting a person to commit an offence,

(c) attempting or conspiring to commit an offence, or

(d) assisting an offender or concealing the commission of an offence.

(2) In subsection (1)(a) the reference to aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring is to conduct that in relation to an indictable offence would be punishable under section 8 of the Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 (c. 94).

(3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(4) In subsection (1)(c)—

(a) the reference to an attempt is to conduct amounting to an offence under section 1 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 (c. 47); and

(b) the reference to conspiracy is to conduct amounting to an offence of conspiracy under section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 (c. 45).

(5) In subsection (1)(d)—

(a) the reference to assisting an offender is to conduct that in relation to a relevant offence would amount to an offence under section 4(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1967 (c. 58); and

(b) the reference to concealing an offence is to conduct that in relation to a relevant offence would amount to an offence under section 5(1) of that Act."

Thus the votes in Parliament for the war, and all other votes that support the continuation of the war, the funding of the war itself, the dissemination of propaganda and misinformation and  the paying of taxes, or that proportion of taxes which goes towards supporting that continued military activity or any infrastructure that allows those military activities to continue, including the parliamentary offices, staff and infrastructure of all parliamentarians who support the wars, is also conduct ancillary to the commission of the War,  as outlined by the above mentioned legislation, which are ratified English, Welsh Law.

Not many people know this. But then not many people are being told about these matters. Certainly the News Press media, owned as the bulk of them are by Oligarchy entities not domiciled in the UK,  are not reporting on this in the manner they ought to if they were in any way speaking truth to power or supporting the interests of the people.

Spread the word.

Campaign to Make Wars History

It is possible to access the evidence, as the lovely people behind *The Campaign to Make Wars History have collated and prepared all the evidence (see the videos below) so that YOU can then present it to your local police station, requesting that they investigate the war crime which you are reporting.

Campaign to Make War History

Videos of a recent Press Conference, presenting the work being done to expose the illegality of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, and the work being done to investigate the breaches of English Law with regards these crimes and to bring to account all those involved.

2022* the website of MHW is no longer active.

Here is a copy of the site archived at WayBackMachine : www.makewarshistory.co.uk -

It contains a wealth of information, collated by the MHW team. Superb resource. It is true that Court Judgments in London have blocked every attempt at moving forwards on War Crimes Investigations, and the Establishment have *exhausted the MHW team, in the same manner they are oppressing Julian Assange and others by waging wars of attrition.

*The Austerity Campaign was designed to exhausted the UK Community Voluntary Sector, and Devolution has protected Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland from the worst ravages. Exhausting activism has a long tradition amongst the English Ruling Class.

The Press Conference was held in

Room C, 1 Parliament Street

Tuesday 15th January 2008 3pm

Here's some videos from that meeting.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiNI5SbIsyg - no longer online.

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDsUxph5nBk - Chris Coverdale, 2001 International Criminal Court Act 2001

Part 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPx9QsXqXBI - : Scotland Yard to investigate Tony Blair and ex-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith for war crimes

Part 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORRVu2KYXUg - Questions & Answers

This report from : grimupnorth.blogspot.com

WAR CRIMES -WHY WASN'T THIS REPORTED?

As a journalist, I pride myself on being media savvy. Unfortunately, like everyone else, I have to scour the internet to by-pass the mainstream media and sometimes miss stuff.

So I wish to now report the press conference held with John McDonnell MP and members of the Campaign to Make War History who briefed MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain's former Prime Minister and the former Attorney General. 

The press conference held with John McDonnell MP and members of the Campaign to Make War History who briefed MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain's former Prime Minister and the former Attorney General.

Officers from Scotland Yard have started a criminal investigation into the deaths of Iraqi citizens killed during the armed invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Metropolitan Police are also acting in response to crimes reported by peace activists from We Are Change UK and The Campaign to Make War History. In an unprecedented step, the case was handed to the War Crimes division of the Counter Terrorism branch who are now investigating allegations of 14 criminal offences committed by Tony Blair, Lord Goldsmith and others. The offences are under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which came into effect under English common law, just two days before 9/11.

Evidence was provided to the police relating to the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and conduct ancillary to these crimes under Sections 51 and 52 of The International Criminal Court Act 2001.• a crime against peace and complicity in a crime against peace under Articles 6 and 7 of The Nuremburg Principles.• murder, incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.• conspiracy to commit genocide, a crime against humanity and war crimes under the Criminal Law Act.
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