Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

On The Language of Conquest, Brexit Escalation and Healthy Civil Governance


The Language of Conquest.


A very interesting study area, in that it studies the ways in which power articulates Empire Logic, the logic of social dominance.

"
How do a country and its citizens justify genocide and land theft?

How do they transform obviously wrong or immoral actions into something righteous and worthy of celebration?

To answer these questions one need only examine the beloved classic 'Little House on the Prairie'³ to observe how expertly Laura Ingalls Wilder crafted a narrative that transformed the horror of white supremacist genocidal thinking and the stealing of Indigenous lands into something noble, virtuous, and absolutely beneficial to humanity.

Unfortunately, rather than recognize the perversion of morality inherent in Wilder’s book, the American public celebrates the work as laudable children’s literature"



(pp. 66-80) Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson 

(From : Unlearning the Language of Conquest)

I have been using the term Empire Logic ever since I created the aphorism "Empower: it never strikes back!" in response to the dull, repetitive Revolutionary Violence good, Oppressive Violence bad, bipolar narrative of "The Empire Strikes Back' : entertainment and ideological bigotry posing as Science Fiction.

Star Wars, dull as.

Empire Logic. 

The logic created by those who seek to dominate others.

Power has one directive and that is to preserve it's status - to that end, everything.

That means that Power must enhance it's material ability to control, coerce, influence, intimidate or corrupt anyone, and any organisation and thus retain the capability to determine the situation.

To do that Power must have access to vast renewable economic resources, in the form of immense, unspeakable wealth and an endless supply of expendable people, with which - people in this system are objects, things to be used - to maintain the bureaucracies, militaries, police forces, prison and compulsion systems and other institutions such as 'education'  and 'entertainment' that operate together to preserve the status quo.

There are many aspects of the language of conquest that euphemise coercion, abuse, even rape and mass murder in order to 'preserve the social order'.

George Carlin has a routine about the euphemism of the language used to describe combat trauma - shell shock, battle fatigue, operational exhaustion, post traumatic stress disorder... each moving the description further away from the lived experience towards an abstraction.



History proves that Institutional Power ensures that a constant flow of instruction is being disseminated via the State, the Media, the Temple and The Flag; the message is broadcast to the school house, to the workforce, into the homes of all the women, the men, the children, the nation.

"This conquest is good. This system is the best. It has flaws, but who doesn't?"

or

"You cannot judge the men who destroyed an entire culture and all its people in the Caribbean in the 1490s by the standards of todays society."

and

"You cannot judge the gropey, misogynistic men of the 1970s with the standards of #metoo."

Wrong.

We can.

We really ought to. Sure, one can claim 'they did not know any better', nonetheless they ignored the harms they caused, they dismissed the qualitative experience and diminished the meaning of those harms just as they dismissed the humanity of those they harmed, and that is the point.

And at the same time, one has to be context aware, in the sense that so much behaviour is culturally engendered, we can understand that free will is a truism rather than a fundamental. A person traumatised in childhood or at any other time, who is rendered unable to heal that trauma will present behavioural patterns with unconscious or subconscious elements of which he or she has little awareness. They hate but they do not know why.

In empire cults, here are cultural dynamics that enable abusive behaviour. 

Any traditional assumptions that justify abuse must be challenged and the culture changed in order to ensure that prevention is possible and then the cultural behaviour will be healed.


In any situation, in any time, in any language, for every person experiencing the reality - one person using power to take abusive advantage over another person - is still a dehumanising and sickening act.

Be it 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia, 40AD in the Roman Empire, Verdun 1916, Vietnam in 1970 or Yemen in 2020 war remains a dehumanising lived experience.

No human being is born designed for that outcome.

Conquest and enslavement, misogyny have always been dehumanising crimes, irrespective of their legal status at any time, then and now, and they always will be.

World War II was not 'Won'.

Vietnam was not 'Lost'.

Iraq is not 'pacified'.

War is never the bringer of freedom from oppression, it is itself a direct tool of ultimate oppression.

Bloody Euphemisms!

We, all of us in the industrialised militarised state systems (this is true in every modern developed country to some degree) had no choice but to grow up within a social and material environment we did not make, and we will have tended to internalise, without noticing it, some of that language, and with it, the thinking and behaviour becomes habituated as normal range within that oppressed situation, and naturally enough we come to think of the internalisations as if it is our own thought, our own behaviour, our exercise of free will.

Who are we?

"I am Irish" is abstract,

"I am this human being" is real.

I have been taught to think I am Irish.  However I am not, because I am a human being first and last.

It just so happened that I was born in London, and all my surviving siblings were born in Ireland. Accident of birth applies to princes as it does to paupers.

Alpha Male, Competing for Dominance, Victory, Authority, Good Violence, God's Enemies, Husband, Wife, Heirs are all part of the language of conquest.

Much of modern corporate language is the language of conquest, as is all marketing. Marketing is largely the craft of conquest by guile, Empire rules through fear of violence and destitution, aspirational marketing rules by peer pressure and fear of missing out.

That the ubiquity and intensity of disruptive opinion messaging associated with the hostile environmental habituation to bullying leads to a variety of chronic stress dynamics that tend to become the most serious breakdowns of health is hardly surprising.

It is also clear to say that resolving those external stressors and de-colonising our own minds and bodies from the language of conquest would do as least as much as any health care intervention might, and probably more. Prevention deserves a healthy budget yet cannot thrive within a hostile environment.

Even if I think you am English, I am not.

There is no such thing as English Flesh. There is no such thing as an English heart, and English Brain - there are no internal biological markers of Englishness.

The idea of Brexit is abstract. That is why no one really knows what it means.

 More about the book 'Unlearning The Language of Conquest' here

"
The language of conquest is ultimately a language of deceit. It echoes in the corridors of every American institution, building illusion upon illusion while robbing all of us of our collective Indigenous wisdom. This book is an effort to expose and replace this deception.

Although it speaks specifically to the colonization and oppression of America’s First Nations and their potential contributions, which have been suppressed by the lies of our dominant culture, no single race of people can lay claim to “Indigenous wisdom.” It lives deep within the heart of every living creature."


Babies

What this probing of the language of conquest also raises for me is the question of what is language before conquest? If I have never been bullied, what language would I draw upon to tell the story of being bullied for the very first time?

What language dynamics prevail among healthy egalitarian human cultures? The oldest cultural modality of the human species, within which we have truly evolved.

Preconquest Consciousness

an essay from the book Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology
E. R. Sorenson

"The preconquest type of consciousness detailed below survives today only in a few, now rapidly vanishing, isolated enclaves. 

Although those we contacted were widely dispersed, they shared a distinctive type of consciousness--one very different from the postconquest type that dominates the world today. It emerged from a type of child and infant nurture common to that era but shunned in ours. 

The outstanding demographic condition required for such a life is small populations surrounded by tracts of open territory into which anyone can diffuse virtually at will. 

This allows those discomfited by local circumstance, or attracted by conditions further on, to move as they wish with whoever might be similarly inclined. This was the case even in the smallest of all the preconquest enclaves seen. 

The outstanding social condition is a sociosensual type of infant and child nurture that spawns an intuitive group rapport and unites people without need for formal rules. 

The outstanding psychological condition is heart-felt rapprochement based on integrated trust. This provides remarkable efficiency in securing needs and responding to nature's challenges while dispensing ongoing delight with people and surroundings"

The language of the infant and the mother infant relationship of empathy and nurture, developed during pregnancy being the beginnings of human language learning.

What does the language of leaving an infant alone, to cry to sleep teach?

What does it speak of?

Brexit

The Surrender Bill aka The Benn Act or 
The EU Withdrawal (No.2) Act 2019

Language, again.

Conquest Language, Saboteurs, Traitors, Collaborators, Enemies of The People, Super State, Sovereignty.

Kill Bill. The heroic psychopath you can identify with.

"Humbug!" to concerns about verbal threats and abuse associated with political violence against MPs.

Again, and again The Surrender Bill.

A deliberate caricature designed to incite emotional anger at the thought of 'betraying' of the loss of ''Sovereignty', triggered within people who have, through no fault of their own, internalised the language of conquest, as independent minded conquerors reclaiming their native independence when we are in fact powerless and too distant from power to ever mediate it.

We all are, in the face of the State, and other large institutional power bases, rendered impotent.

And as we witness the escalation of language to increase tension, to trigger anger, rage, wrath and fear. 

The media public is not the real public. There are too many decent people, already active

The media public is a caricature.


The real public is real people : diverse, mostly decent, kind people dealing with what ever they are faced with, with as much dignity and grace and love as they can muster, doing their best under some very trying circumstances, within a dysfunctional hierarchy culture.

Entertainment within a culture of hierarchy of power and status and privilege must function as political conditioning theatre, a distraction narrative, aimed at the consumers, as voters in factions, whilst in board rooms, conference halls and in hotels and on yachts, in think tanks and public and private funded University and research institutions, the detailed work progresses privatisation of the commons in unison.

They use the language of conquest to divide us, they use democratic deliberation among themselves to wage war against us.

We need to build social solidarity through honesty and meeting our real needs as persons, as human being, not as institutionalised commodities - as in The Expendable Work Force.  That is not who we are.

We need to use more than questioning, more than the 'I don't trust them' approach to bear down upon the lies and manipulation, the liars and the gaslighting.

We need to understand, to know what we are truly dealing with. We need to grapple with the evidence, and we need to set belief and opinion aside to do that.



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.

Race, Hierarchy, Language and the bio-logical health of the human species.


A few insights into the problems posed by wide spread misunderstanding of human social behavioural dynamics.

 1. There are no Races, only language groups. Skin colour does not predict language, language is a local emergent phenonemon,  and varies vastly acorss the planet, apart from where a language is spread by conquest or occupation.







2. There exists a pre-historical and historical material spectrum of social organisation, ranging from egalitarian through to hierarchically violent, with the varying behavioural characteristics associated with each.

3. Almost all behaviour is learned. Environment and experience  modulate all body systems. Culture and experience dictates behaviour.

4. We humans thrived for millions of years because we were biologically healthy - that means secure attachment bonding, robust sense of self within strong kin relationships, co-operative effort and autonomy plus the sensory capability to read the environment, accurately, and adapt to change accordingly.

5. We, typing these words, live within an Institutionalised Hierarchy of Violence.

6. That Hierarchy has had the gall to rename the 'natural' world and it's processes as both separate from Humanity and Civilisation, (to objectify and commodify) to utilise it as a scapegoat, (onto which it projects it's own brutality, lust and position in the power chain), whilst also suggesting their hierarchical behaviour is as 'natural God given aggression', weaving into Darwins vague observations the ideology of survival of the most violent as a natural dynamic, repositing it as survival of the fittest State, Military, Corporation. This institutionalised objectifyication has a history, and no pre-history. The Warrior Gene. It's all false assumption.

7. Most of us have been educated and indoctrinated to one degree or another, by the Hierarchy, and to that extent that we have internalised that 'education' we are divorced from some of our healthiest human perceptions.

And because indoctrination is always psychologically invasive, and because infants, toddlers and small children have no defence agaiunst such invasive practices, not least if practiced and enforced at home, where the child's psyche ought be wholly safe, respected, honoured the process becomes unconsciously transmitted down the generations as 'normal behaviour'. It gains momentum, traction with each successive generation.

8. That's a lot of shit to deal with, plus the war! (the fact of war has a huge impact on social relations world wide)... I think of the billions of people who have been exploited, indoctrinated into furthering the expoloitation. I think of them, and the bullies who have the power to bully millions of people at a time. I know who I hold most responsible.

9. The problem is the industrial culture, not the people - the people are all subjected to indoctrination and to work requirements. Both are problematic, both are imposed to benefit the hierarchy. The industrial militarised hierarchy are problematic. The problem is bullies seek power, and gain it, with relative ease because they have designed the system thus.

10. The problem is technical in as much as who becomes involved in policy decision making with regards to shared communal resources of any kind.

example : Any group that has persisted on undeveloped land for unknowable times must be seen as the legal stewardsor inhabitants of that land. They must also be understood - they see and experience themselves as part of that environment, not on it, or in it.

Any entry into those lands has to be for the local societies to determine, at every level, in all apsects.

11. It is absolutely the case that White European Empire and Conquest has a long and bloody History, and has been the primary driver of extinction of human societies and culture within the past 600 years....

12. White people often object to critiques that lay out the human cost of that expansion, because they have internalised so much of the cultural identities provided via indoctrination that any critique of the culture FEELS like a personal attack.

White Elites manipulate that to the hilt.

So too, do all bullies. It is a standard bully tactic.

There are no archetypes, no Races, only living human beings, in a specturm between natural and institutionalised societal dynamics.

---

Here is what one group of pre-conquest societies offer as an insight to their needs...

Kametsa Asaike ‘Living Well’ Agenda for Development
Central Asháninka del Rio Ene


1. To live like Asháninka Sanori
2. To live eating what we know.
3. To live secure and serene in the territories we have always lived in.
4. To live in peace, without suffering from Terrorism
5. To live better, producing [cash crops] in order to buy what we require.
6. To live healthily using our own medicine and also well attended by the health post and the mobile medical brigade.
7. To live with education that will help us improve and empower us as Asháninka.
8. To live well with an organisation that listens to us and defends our rights.

I came across this through a good friend, who has just finished a Masters Thesis on the issue of 'sustainable development models' being activated by Climate Conscious NGOs whose own relationships reveal contradictory behaviour... 

Philanthropic behaviour that is claimed to be one thing, at face value, yet upon examination from the perspective of the 'un-developed' society and other material ecological criteria we see repeatedly failure to listen to those people, to see them as 'equals' or to engage with them as land tenure holders...

The urge to assimsilate, to Chritianise, to impose socio-economic status as a measure of well being: such help which is all invasive, no matter their claims to be for the benefit of the target groups.

---

They understand logging as Terrorism, mining as Terrorism, not least because the methodlogy of both demands disturbing the ecological balance, and clearing the land of those who inhabit it....by force or by deceit.

--

In my opinion, all areas inhabited by pre-conquest cultures, or pre-industrial cultures must be ceded to those communities that are truly native. extant, thriving...

Across the world, Aboriginal societies are at best afforded flimsy tenure of the surface, yet the subsoil and rock is 'owned' by the State.

This allows the State to legislate exploitation of the sub soil domain without referal to the native societies...

----


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.

Wrong Word : "Oi Paedo!"


Paedophile : is a technical term, and piece of misleading use of language.

More correct would be 'manipulative or violent (child/minor) focused sex attacker': irrespective of who is being attacked, the choice to attack, to manipulate, to predate upon the other, is always, always equally evil.

This choice is made  possible only when the other, the person is transformed into an object, is de-humanised.

‘OI!  PEADO!” - the unsubstantiated internet.gossip allegations being promoted with some vigour ....

This is human evil….. and the beginnings of yet more human evil, ‘oi peado!’, followed by an assault, based on what evidence?

"..... don't like the look of that individual!"? "I heard that...."? "It's on the internet!"

(as opposed to "I found direct links to proven evidence that stands up on the internet, and then I checked them....")

One might comment that those people that enjoy or seek pleasure in violence, manipulation or predation are more evil than those who perhaps behaving thus because they ‘are doing a job’.  Soldiers?  Vigilantes? Prison Officers? Police?

The Stanford Prison Experiment - The Power of the Situation to de-humanise ...

Is the line between either of these definitions really real? Does the person on the receiving end care more which side of the line their attacker is on?

Dehumanisation can also find expression in the way an agenda driven analysis might attribute negative qualities to chosen opponents, perceived ‘enemies’, as a way of undermining how others perceive them..

I don't think this is something we can leave to just one sector of Society.

This 'issue' affects us ALL! In real terms, in the lived experience.

The issue, as I see it, is not just one set of actions, by one particular group of people, but an entire spectrum of behaviours that are almost Institutionalised in full, in the social structures that have emerged from the current Dominant Statist Culture.

They might appear to be many individual states, yet there are only states, no 'nations' in the distinct sense of an aboriginal 'nation'. There is a trans national myth of social organisation that seeks infinite expansion in a finite world.

All of these sets of relationships, personal and Institutional, have been adversely  influenced by the Power, (which David Smail calls 'distal power' - power beyond the average person’s ability to affect) so that a majority of living relationships end up becoming Power Relationships.

Assault and sexual exploitation of children, or the murder of civilians, including children, by military, the willingness to really heavily harm another, or to kill to get one's perceived needs met,  as acted out by individuals or groups or Institutions.... these are extremes of that spectrum .....  of power relationships – as opposed to empathic relationships, a spectrum that ranges from close intimacy to the collective interactions that are expressed in healthy psychologically social, cultural, and organisational behaviours.


The other end of the spectrum of Power Relationships is, for me at this time, describable in a speculative manner, as a kind of starting point description:

So here goes: behaviour that may be the expression of social and experiential distress, and that has an adverse affect on others only because it appears or presents as petty bickering, jealousy, sullen-ness, sulk, mind-games, sexism, thoughtlessness and whole host of other variations on psychological distress languaging.  The person is unhappy. And needs support and help, appropriate attention.

In between we have a range of permitted behaviour that is expressed all too clearly in our history texts, our newspapers, our entertainments, notably, war, invasion, infinite growth empire/economies, militarised police FORCE, and 'non-permitted' yet fairly widespread organised violent crime (which in some cases is linked to wars pursued by Institutions of State), gang wars, organised group violence of any kind, domestic abuse, bullying.... it's all linked. Some is ‘good’ Some is ‘bad’.

IT’S ALL HARMFUL. EXTREMELY HARMFUL!

I think that to address one serious area of this harming dynamic one has to commit to  addressing the holistic image, the whole picture of a Dominant Culture in psychological distress  - to also see how this 'fits in' in a cultural sense.

This means to me that when I can fully humanise the victimiser, to fully humanise the survivor, not to excuse anything, certainly not to mitigate the trauma and what followed, and humanise what that MEANT to the survivor, the person who was victimised,  and to fully understand these events and what may have lead to them, in order to securely find a societal pathway to prevent further victimisation. This is not a single issue.

 Wherever it occurs. Starting with myself.

Let me address the behaviour, and see the human being as human, through broken, damaged and dangerous; part of my family.

One I must stop from any further damaging behaviour.

Can I see the 'enemy' as a human being, and not a monster. It makes it easier, I think, to look at the behaviour, to look at the experiences of people and assess what one finds, honestly.

It doesn't diminish the horror, the revulsion, the sheer visceral anger and shock we all naturally feel, up close to such behaviour - until we are de-humanised : that is what military training tries to do, certainly in terms of the 'enemy'. Veterans appear to 'get over it', mostly.

It doesn't mean not being angry, not feeling the rage, suppression. for me, it means choosing not to cause harm whilst feeling the anger, the rage, the frustration.

Fully conscious. Fully aware, Alive.

For me, this is all about the David Icke, Rense, Jones stable of publishing that hypes the horror, insinuates and alleges, and present no credible attributable sourced EVIDENCE for their claims,and worse, they rarely speak of the world of child development, trauma studies, intergenerational behaviour patterning, the study of the development of empathy and it's biological functioning, which it appears is our natural optimal.

Why?

Surely if there's proven evidence, then the two go together: if one is committed to resolving the issue.

The Institutionalisation of Power Relationships across Society, from violent abusers in 'care homes', 'prisons', 'schools', the office  bully, to warring states, the disruption of the child mother bonding essential to the development of empathy, as a socio-cultural structures is a crucial matter.

Address that and the rest will flow from there.
This is not to be taken to mean mitigating the needs of those being victimised or of Survivors. The two go hand in hand.
The latter being the more immediate need.

There is time then to deal with the former matter in depth, over time.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe



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