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.
Nurture is our bio-logical default, is key to any sustained and healthy human culture.
So what does it mean to be a man?
Or rather, what aspect of being male as in being a person in a male spectrum body, without referring to external value systems, is real and optimally healthy. In part this is a question for each of us, because the answers must come from our interior, the internal who we are part, the baby/person before conditioning started. The other part is ensuring the cultural space for 'male' is reflecting optimal human healthy behaviour, that integrates the diversity of our interiors, that holds space for all our variety.
For me revisioning what it is to be a healthy male on #InternationalMensDay suggests a need to confront the oppressive characteristics the culture tends towards as essentialist when laying out what a man is, and how a man 'should' or 'should not' behave to fit that image.
I sense a need for this task everywhere - I think we need to do it accurately, it must be evidence based and I think we need to approach it with good heart, determined to create cultural and social and material space for nurture mutual aid, rather than dominance competition as the core gender root.
My definition : we see and understand the violent hierarchy cult and we see it's inequity and we will, holding hands with one another, as men and women, work together to confront that inequity and correct it, thus bringing human culture into a healthy balance as we move forwards, and thus dismantling those obsolescent oppressive cultural conditionings.
We, as responsible adult men call up for this movement emerging from within the humane population, the ordinary, decent, kind community minded folk, to act together and to behave in ways that generate genuine equity and lasting justice because we know that peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is the presence of social material and cultural safety and equity for all, everywhere.
Here's a good place to start from - our beginnings
What Babies Want
#honesty #learning #natural
We are evolved to learn through playful co-operation void of judgement, reward or punishment.
my song about learning.
The Culture of Violent Hierarchy trickles down and afflicts us all, from conception onwards. Men and Women alike. It is not healthy and it certainly does not have to be the way it is, even if the task of confronting this looks immense the status quo is not inevitable.
I have had enough (of the bully cult).
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.
Opinion now, in this conversation, is truly dangerous.
Look it as a genuine health and safety issue, along with belief,
faith, hope or ideology - none of these can be allowed to trump the
evidence (no topical pun intended...) in seeking to resolve this situation.
It will not be resolved overnight.
It can be resolved.
It is not the Sun.
It is us.
David Smail.
David Smails take on ‘reality’ is closest to what I feel :
“Hardly any of the ‘symptoms’ of psychological distress may correctly be
seen as medical matters.
The so-called psychiatric ‘disorders’ are
nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of
individual moral weakness or other personal failing.
They are the
creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is
structured by power.
Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or
advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a
variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and
ideological (the control of meaning).
Power is the dynamic which keeps
the social world in motion.
It may be used for good or for ill.
One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological
distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an
analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society.
Such
an understanding is the focus of this web-site.”
Alice Miller wrote about how the institutional violence of the adult
world afflicts all our children.
She traced the psychology of power through society, into human relationships, and how the influence of violent political
power permeates society. Miller looked at the history of education in Europe, leading up to World War II, and examines the industrial powers influence on it to prepare each generation of
children for participation in that violence, as workers or as fighters, as if it were something
normal.
Something Patriotic.
Heroic.
Fighting for a Cause.
See where this is going?
FOR YOU OWN GOOD : The Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing.
She is not talking about individual parenting, (a common misconception of her intent) she looks at cultural
parenting, which is often subject to belief, faith, religion, ideology
or mere opinion rather than the evidence about, and of children themselves.
She explores how repeated war trauma fosters socialised
violence when entire populations are subjected to violence, over time, to the extent that that history is seen as glorious.
Internalisation. Very much part of radicalisation.
A very strong book, a disciplined read required.
That said....
Some Steps Towards an End to TWAT And a Start to Peace.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*This is of course an incomplete list, with only the briefest of pitches, and very little supporting, referenced documentation to substantiate the points raised.
It’s more to a thought smorgsabord on the issue of TWAT And Peace.
Here goes :
Actions that Western and all Governments can take that might lend towards a long term peace.
-caveat : there's more that I don't know than I do about all of this. A lot more. This analysis is not to be relied upon. In any way, shape or form. It is a list to things I think could alter the situation in useful ways......
1. Acknowledge the War Crime of Iraq and Afghanistan which is the responsibility of the US /UK Coalition of States that invaded and occupied both countries.
2. Arrest the War Criminals.
3. Full public accounting. Convictions.
4. Formal economic, political and cultural sanctions regime against Saudi Arabia, and it’s Wahhabist intervention in Government.
5. Cease all support for Saudi military, including ban on weapons sales. A total ban.
6. Cease all military operations against the Syrian Government. Immediately.
6.a Destroy all DAESH supply lines. No exception. Ensure no funding, arms, munitions, food, oil, petrol, diesel, medicine gets through to their fighting units. If States are involved, then they must be dealt with. International effort in good faith and honour.
7. Allow the Syrian State and people to confront DAESH in Syria, and with respect to language groups and ethnicities, enable autonomy for those as part of the political resolution of other matters. Allow the Syrian State to invite chosen allies to assist with this operation.
8. Abandon the US-UK-Russia-China competing powers behaviour which is the active dynamic in international relations. That behaviour is toxic, irrational and utterly cruel.
9. Excise all incitements to violence from all recognised Religious Texts. These are in breach of Human Rights, and cannot be countenanced.
10. Total separation of Religion and Government, and Legislation. World wide. Governance MUST be evidence based, rather than belief, faith, sectional interest or mere opinion
11. Close down Saudi funded Wahhabist Maddrassa systems, total removal. World wide. Such systems are institutionalised child abuse. No negotiation. Full records of all students to be provided.
12. Demand Saudi excise all incitement to or justification of violence from Wahhabist Texts and Teachings, and remove corporal punishment from the Saudi penal code, as an olive branch, or a carrot, a way to avoid actions 4., 5,
13. Ban Saudi Oil. Last resort.
14. Stand down all international military alliances in favour of a United Nations based resource, resourced from those competing military alliances. The UN treaties provide for a military force that maintains peace, enforces sanctions as a policing action, supporting a diplomatic, political, economic and cultural conflict resolution drive, which must, of course, be equally well resourced.
15. Detain all known participants in militia in their home countries. Process these the weed out those who are reliably dangerous, prosecute those for crimes committed and incarcerate them for Health and Safety reasons.
16. Tear apart the media cabal, and liberate the press, to articulate solid critical analysis of matters of Governance, based on evidence rather than alignments with belief, faith, ideology, bias, opinion.
17. Arrest Murdoch. Close down all media that spin, that present opinion as information, that are aligned with any political party, that are lobby tools for power interests.
18. Public Parenting information must be based on evidence rather than alignments with belief, faith, ideology, bias, opinion. Parents must be legally made to comply with the child’s Human Rights in full. Parents do not have any right to tell their child what to think. Ever.
19. Rebuilding, reparations. We must devote the resources we have to help rebuild what has been destroyed, and restore people and society to a healthy sustainable state.
20. We must also build Systems of Deliberative Democracy, rather than representative Democracy, which is obviously a failed experiment. Power as a shared responsibility.
21. Rekindle old language groups and environmental ethnicity’s, the thriving variation of healthy human culture.
22. In all, evidence based action must be the standard. All evidence must be appraised, no piece omitted, neglected, dismissed, mitigated or denied.
23. End Competing States/Warring States as an accepted political dynamic.
24, Decriminalise mind altering plants and their usage as sacred tools, and medicine.
25. Pay close attention to the Australian Aboriginals people, for they have a well of lived experience for which there is no other comparable population, listen to them and hear their message.
They are the polar opposites of the Jidhadist/Competing Industrial Powers insanity.
They truly know how to live on Earth as fully human beings in sustainable cultures.
: TWAT = The War Against Terror.
They have survived an attempted Genocide, and are here today, offering wisdom, love, nurture and peace to the culture that tried to wipe them out.
It doesn't get any tougher, in terms of diplomacy and negotiation than that. If they can, anyone can.
Yes, it's not going to be easy.
Just a reminder, Alice Miller, The Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing.
Get hold of a copy..
A Peace activists must-read.
Again and again.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that.
You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not.
I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons.
Thank you for reading.
"we don't like honest people being honest about our behaviour"
'New upstarts'? was what one pundit Mefia commentator said of the Momentum group within the Labour Party.
People who he suggests are intent on taking over and destroying the Labour Party from within, a surge of insurgents, an anti-demcoratic horde of ranting idealists, who will NEVER gain power, and will condemn Labour to infinite futility. That's the general mainstream view, the 'public opinion' as manufactured by the Moguls of Mordor and Murdoch.
So let me tell you who I think some of those people are...
A generation of people who were 14 -16 or so when the adults, their parents, teachers, mentors, celebrities etc allowed the British Government to invade Iraq. And their parents, mentors and communities.
They are in their late 20s now, fully adult and effing furious with our generation, their parents and grand parents, who failed to stop that invasion, (largely because we were fixated on home ownership and wealth 'creation' which drove inequity ever deeper in the UK) when the evidence at the time was clear.
A general strike would have been enough to bring the British State involvement in Iraq to a halt. It was mooted at the time but dismissed without a rational debate.
We marched, and then went home....
No WMD, Regime Change 100% illegal, War of Aggression 100% Illegal, no association with 9/11 and a country that had been bombed for more than a decade vs the mightiest military on Earth..... all this info was easily available on line at the time. To those who made the effort.
Those ADULTS that did not seek out that information, but relied upon 'opinion' have by default enabled that War Crime and appear to be wholly unwilling to confront that and have left a mess that the children of 2003 and their contemporaries in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere are all too aware of - that is how these 'upstarts' see matters and they are correct.
They see the previous generations are too timid to call out the bullies, the bullying system.
It's also valid to point out that mere opinion is not the same as evidence or data.... and thus mere opinion is not sufficient when making decisions that affect other peoples lives so deeply, so harmfully.
Neither is religious belief, right wing or left wing ideological bias.
All of these are inadequate to the task of genuine democracy, which is the administration of our shared resource, taxation, for the equal benefit of all people in our society.
You would not accept a brain surgeon operating on the basis of 'opinion' - you would want data, evidence, precedence and insurance... and absolutely due diligence and duty of care....
Most of what is published as fact in mainstream media is mere opinion. Donald Trump's ascendancy is a direct result of submission to mere opinion. Likewise Hilary Clinton's nomination by the Democrats, who were proven to have acted amorally and possibly illegally in their fight back against the people who lifted Sanders...... Brexit was another victory of opinion over evidence.
It's immature to base decision making that affects peoples lives on mere opinion, and it is also careless, irresponsible and feeble.
If I was in my 20's or 30's now I'd be utterly, utterly disgusted at my parents generation. And terrified of the future they have bequeathed me and my contemporaries.
'New upstarts. - HOW DARE YOU!
Most people I know in their teens, 20's and 30's see clearly that the old system of Governance is corrupted, it is a bully system and they fear for their futures as people of good heart (above and beyond home ownership and jobs...) and they are furious, frustrated, appalled and deeply saddened by the way the previous generations of people with such privilege have failed to honour their children's futures....
And you ain't seen nothing yet. These are not young 'idealists' - they live with the reality in a way previous generations do not.... connected, international, global, tolerant, caring, compassionate and robust in their thinking, superbly well informed.
And active.
Get behind them adults, get behind them and support your future grand children's futures.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that.
You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not.
I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons.
Thank you for reading.
Often folk make the error of conflating 'blame' and 'seeking accountability’.
Or we may equate punishment with justice.
Many equate politics with governance.
These are all quite different dynamics and it is useful to be able to
distinguish between them.
Very, very pertinent, and very, very useful.
The Origins of a Foreign Policy to bomb
the Iraq
nation.
Oil is just one ofthe mediums. Power is
the issue. Psychology is the issue.
The Western Power Establishment are 100% opposed to the emergence of any
independent, grass roots supported democratic Governance emerging in the Middle East because such Governments might choose to trade oil in alternative currencies and undermine the value of UK and US currencies.
Furthermore, the emergence of any Government that is truly responsive to the needs of the people is seen as an existential threat to the status quo. Rightly so.
They bully the strong, the weak they co-opt.
To that end they ignore the harms they are
causing to real people.
They are emotionally blind to the truth of what the
outcomes of their policy means in real human terms.
Watch this and you might get an insight into what is being done in the world
of politics, and not being done in the world of Governance.
"Give me the child til age 7, and I will give you the man!"
Politics is quite separate from
Governance. I tend to make a distinction between Governance
- the administration of a communities shared contributory resource (tax
revenue) for the equal benefit if all citizens, and Politics, which is the
strategic struggle to gain, retain, enhance and project Power over a people and protect it from any other contenders.
I think we need that distinction, and an
understanding of how bullying operates and functions so that we can discern
when that power play is usurping healthy Governance.
We need to be able to see when we are being
deliberately triggered, misled, lied to, goaded and we need to be able to
respond rather than react.
We are nowhere yet near a position of enough
strength at the grass roots to fully support and protect a kinder, humane and
evidence based Governance, which will face the strongest resistance from the
Power Establishment. We are not there yet.
If you look at it, how much worse will your
disappointment be if we elect a kinder Governance and we are unable to protect
it from the Power Establishment?
Be realistic and honest.... if we can be
triggered, then we are not yet ready for the shared responsibilities of power.
It's about exercising power rather than the attractions of greed.
Their
violence requires great wealth to fund it. Their power is dependent upon the
violence they can marshal, and upon their ability to indoctrinate their captive
populations.
They use our cash, as consumers and as tax payers, to do all of this.
This is a long game we are playing out.
Hold the line, do not be too dismayed and stay engaged. Stay strong.
We pay their wages. Corporations pay their bonuses.
People who seek power over others get a hormonal cascade when they exercise
that power - they are addicted to that exercise of power.
They also internalize
their positions of power. It becomes personal for them. "Le Etate C'est Moi!" or “I am the State!”
They seek to control Governance in order to ensure they can continue to
accrue greater wealth, and maintain their status of power, and because
Governance gives them the cover to abuse the people and get away with it. It is
rigged.
It's been like that for a while, it is NOT healthy human behaviour, it is
not part of optimal human biological health, it is a pathology and it is
institutionalised.
More healthy Governance, less political power struggles is all we are asking
for. Is it really too much to ask for in the 21st Century?
A new Conservative Government.
Do not worry about who or what personality is appointed to what post; it makes
very little difference to the realities we are facing.
The policies will be
pretty much a continuation.
It makes little difference to the Syrians, the Libyans, the Iraqi's.
They
are the faces of oppression, and that is all you really need to know.
Do not allow yourselves to be trolled, or enervated, or dismayed or hopeful
etc by the successive announcements of who is getting what job.
Turn it all off, you can see it all complete tomorrow.
Take time out to nurture, to regain some strength, to feed your heart -
cook, eat, make love, sing, write, sleep, dream and just be for one day, one evening, one night.
It will all be there tomorrow, and if you are rested, nurtured and relatively calm you
will be a much better place to deal with it all.
You are not Syrian, Iraqi, Libya,
Yemeni.... you are very, very fortunate to be born here, in the UK.
Use that good fortune, do not waste it.
Know who you are.
Remember who you are.
Step out of short term hope into certainty as to where your heart and mind is standing
and where you are going.
Do not allow yourselves to be trolled by the mainstream media or dismayed by
changes and struggles within Government, my British friends.
We are not facing anything like the depravity of Iraq,
Libya, Syria.... we do
have space to operate in.
Know what you are about. Stand on it. Develop your stamina. Stay the course.
War Crimes. The Law. A reality check.
1. The Laws prohibiting war were then as they are now. Nothing has changed.
2. The senior Lawyer at the Foreign Office, Elizabeth Wilmshurst quit
her role in protest just before the war. She did what the sitting MP's all failed to do. She stood by the Law.
She had been at the FO since 1974. She was
100% clear that the invasion was a War of Aggression, the supreme war
crime, in that it contains all other war crimes.
Her letter of resignation made this clear. ALL Cabinet level politicians had access to that advice. "I cannot in conscience go along with advice - within the
Office or to the public or Parliament - which asserts the legitimacy of
military action without such a resolution, particularly since an
unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of
aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are
so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law."
Elizabeth was the leading legal expert at the Foreign Office at that time.
3. ALL MP's have a duty of care and of due diligence that is inherent
in their roles as MP's. as representatives of their constituencies.
Each
and everyone of them had a duty to examine the Laws prohibiting war,
and to understand them as they applied at the time.
Failure to do so,
along with voting for the War, on such a matter where peoples lives (the
troops they were sending, their families) were being put into harms
way, and where the outcomes for Iraqi civilians were likely to be
horrific, was negligence of the highest order.
They all had plenty of
time to exercise due diligence and honour their duty of care.
They are all culpable under the Law for their actions.
Angela Eagle is 100% culpable. She cannot fly.
4. Jeremy Corbyn is 100% committed to upholding the Law, as is John
McDonnell, and as are the vast majority of grass roots electorate.
That
is the threat the Establishment want to neutralise.
And they will fail.
They are failing. Hold steady. Stay strong.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that.
You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not.
I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons.
Thank you for reading.
Remember, remember the 5th of November, then Remembrance Sunday.
It ought to be grief, horror and outrage rather than Nationalism and Celebration of Sacrifice. Guy Fawkes was Terrorist, a Catholic Jihadist. Tony Blair is a Catholic Jihadist. Both liars and psychopaths.
Joe Glenton speaks of war from direct experience and reflection. Watch this and forget about my polemic. really.
The theme of violence and the State's appropriation of 'our violence is a patriotic and civilising violence' and therefore moral, whereas the violence of 'our enemies' is always barbaric, primitive, dysfunctional and amoral.
What history tells us is that when a movement emerges within any population that seeks to strike parity between the State and the Grass roots of society, the poor, the vulnerable, the working for a living, the State introduces and escalates violence on all sides.
Northern Ireland, a different perspective.
In Northern Ireland, the Civil Rights movement was less a Catholic or Independence phenomenon than it was a civil rights awareness phenomenon that emerged as a direct result of the Civil Rights movements in the US, from African Americans to Women and Children's rights.... a matter of common decency and humane respect.
The State perceived this as a threat, rather than the healing it was offering.
The UK State infiltrated violent militia on all sides, and it's agents escalated the violence, and this put the matter of Civil Rights to one side, and allowed the UK State to alter the discourse, to make it about Irish Nationalism vs Unionism.... that was a strategic tactic.
It was already in practice in Yemen, in Korea and Vietnam, in the Philippines and many South American countries, in Africa and Australia and Canada, in Russia and China, across the Middle East.
Remember, remember.
So remember, remember the realities - that State violence, in the competing powers perspective, is the primary source of warfare, of trauma, of inter-generational psychological and emotional dysfunction and the preservation of mass poverty (war impoverishes all but the makers of the tools of war).
The Monarchy and the State (Established Power) as we know it is altering the climate of human relationships in the most adverse ways, and has been doing so for thousands of years - that 'competition' is psychopathic, is a pathology, an illness, a self inflicted disease state and they continually make great efforts to indoctrinate their home populations into accepting war as part and parcel of human nature. It's not. It's a cultural distortion, born of hierarchies of violence.
Spot the difference?
I'd like to see THAT climate change addressed as part of the issue of 'Climate Change'. - I think that success in the former would help the latter, whereas failure in the former ensures the latter will not be dealt with.
Remember, remember. Think, question, analyse, reflect and grow. Or not.
Heroes
Heroes? The troops?
They would not call themselves heroes.
1. They are trained to be that way - to remain competent under fire, so they can better protect each other, and be willing and capable of killing the enemy. Iraq was not a matter of defence, it was a matter of offence.
2. Calling them heroic is part of how the conditioning, the acceptance
of military violence is maintained. It masks the reality of applied
organised violence. It papers over the reality of shredded limbs, displaced peoples, torture, rape, poison, mass destruction, industrialised killing, indoctrination and bullying, which is what war really is.
3. They never use the word themselves, and not out of humility - rather they know what violence is like, and that it is not heroic. Yes, there are times when courage is shown. Sometimes those who desert are the bravest.
Soldiers are human beings who have been conditioned, lied to, manipulated and placed in harms way. As soon as the violence starts, they have to take action. They have no choice if they wish to survive.
To truly support the troops, we do not need to wave flags as they depart, we need to prevent that departure and that entail breaking the spell The State/Established Power casts over the population, destroying the propaganda with logic, evidence, empathy, kindness and determination.
And that means honesty, truth, the evidence over opinion, ideology and spin.
Prevention
For
me, this is the issue : the matter of the prevention of the creation of
yet more veterans. It matters more now than ever, in as much as the
past few decades we have allowed the Government of the UK to initiate
and escalate wars and violence across the Middle East.
Whilst preciously little effort was put into prevention, or conflict resolution.
The logic of Powers competing for Hegemony and access to 'resources' still dominates politics.
This is insane, it is pathological and as we see, lethal.
How can it stand?
The
hypocrisy is rank, the stench of dying by violence is blanked out, and
we are opiated, sedated and disempowered intentionally so that the
supply of potential candidates for combat veteranship is maintained.
Wear
a Poppy. And if you mean it, then act to stop your Government from using
War as a policy enforcement tool. And stop private companies from
making profits from war.
Halloween
I don't celebrate Hallowe'en in such fashion as is current 'fashionable' : it is largely a post-Celtic Christianised bastardised version of much older shamanic practices, where the practice was to engage with and feel a part of and honour the ancestry, that long, long line of experience and living, a line of nurturing experience within which in the older egalitarian societies placed themselves in their present and looked to how they could nurture the futures ahead of them, as their ancestors did. To draw on that wisdom.
Fully conscious. Fully present. Fully mature.
The post-Celtic Christianised bastardised version revolves around the gargoyle, the fear of the dead, the fear of 'bad spirits' and bears no sense of one's responsibility to the future, nor does it carry forwards the example of the past as a role model.
It's shite, trite and painfully insulting to the ancestry and the future children....
The Celts were violent hierarchies, just as the Romans were, so the transition was all too easy an assimilation.
I have practiced the call to the ancestry, the call to the future, to place myself fully in the present, and have been practicing this for over 2 decades.
I am a bag of bacteria, an aboriginal humane being and I reject the culture of the bully in every aspect, and I embrace the culture of nurture because it is that culture that creates the very possibility of a life of great beauty without the need for 'additives' or luxuries, power or grandiose monuments.
Remembrance.
This is another reason I experience deep distaste, a disgust with the various War Dead Remembrance Ceremonies of the 'good and the great', the pomp and circumstance, and the political abuse of people's genuine concern for the dead, the maimed, the refugees, the sufferings of war.
For all we claim, we have done nothing to undermine the Governments willingness to use War as a policy enforcement tool. Successive Governments have piled more dead upon dead, created yet more refugees, maimed and traumatised countless innocent, beautiful human souls and destroyed the shared resources of many varied and functional living communities, rendering them un-inhabitable.
