Militarism Today - A Dominator Cult destroying human health, everywhere.
I have attended a good few outdoor dance festivals during my career as a musician and as a DJ. I cannot even begin to imagine the terror and horror of what was done to those young people dancing, loving, laughing.
Militarism and it's children: factories producing industrial scale of weapons and supplies, with money taken from workers to fund it, warfare, is shredded bodies, blood and gore, civilian wastelands, shock, terror, chaos, confusion, vomit, spatter, puddle, piss, excrement, burning flesh, cries and groans, hours upon hours upon days upon weeks upon months upon years and centuries of muttered agony and death.
Rest in Peace, they say - too late I say.
Peace is, for the living, an absolute necessity. Peace in death is a delusion. There's no evidence for it either. The only evidence of Peace can be found amongst the living. The only reason for Peace is found amongst the living. Peace is a necessity for human life to thrive happily.
The horror, the disgusting reality of warfare, the smell and vision of wars upon wars, upon wars, cities, towns, villages aand homes filled with gore and grief, hatred and sorrow. Blood and mud, blood and sand, blood and water, blood and snow, blood and asphalt, blood and concrete, blood and grass, blood and glass, blood and babies, blood and their mothers, even in utero, spattered human flesh, and excreta, and body parts beyond recognition, that’s war.
Millenia of men slaughtering one another, for honour, pride, land, conquest.
Those who survive, are scarred, by degree. Nobody who wages war, who does the fighting, wins. Not on any side. They all lose. The merchants of death do make a solid profit, of course they do. That's the point.
A music festival is attacked, hundreds murdered, wounded, some taken captive, thousands flee in total terror. They were dancing, doing no harm at all. Israel 2023
A shopping centre is hit by a missile, fifty four die immediately, hundreds injured. Ukraine 2023
An attack helicopter mistakes a group of journalists, cites them as ‘terrorists’, gets approval for a strike, strikes and then attacks a rescue van, with a child in the front passenger seat. Iraq 2004
An entire population subjected to a militarised blockade, now facing aerial bombardment by drones. Gaza, for decades, 2023.
A squad of combat troops enter a peasant village, and proceed to murder everyone, burn their entire village to the ground. A helicopter pilot sees this, intervenes, stops massacre. The matter is covered-up, more or less. Vietnam 1970s.
Israeli military issue press release announcing more aerial bombardment of Gaza, acknowledges it may harm some hostages, accepts that price. Tel Aviv 2023
A hospital and school and water treatment plant in Yemen are bombed by Saudi pilots in American War Jets, serviced by American and British technicians. Yemen 2022
Hamas gives warning that unless Israel cease the aerial bombardment of civilians in Gaza, which is happening, which they are enduring would be to murder one hostage, every hour, one by one. Gaza 2023.
Revenge on both sides feeding the oven of hate, baking the crusty bread of hatred hard. Such a bread cannot be chewed and digested when it is baked so hard.
Armenian ethnic Azerbaijani’s flee Azerbaijan, as ethnic Azerbaijani’s take militarised control of their province. 2023
Old men make decisions that throw millions of people into war, millions of entirely innocent people, families, grand parents, children, homes, villages, farms. Lives destroyed.
The vulnerability of us ordinary folk, when a military ‘operation’ runs through our shared commons is real.
The power disparity is immense.
Families at a wedding or a funeral facing armed, trained, resourced combat troops and their supporting machinery?
A small party of dancers in the desert are attacked by traumatised angry raging people using automatic weapons, deploying military skill set against defenceless holiday makers. War is horrific.
Apparently this is all illegal, under International Law. Which is true. It is.
Who upholds the Law? No-one does.
Who does not? Every militarised state that engages in warfare.
Why? Because warfare is a tool of the Dominator Culture.
Who pays for it? We do, us ordinary people, everywhere.
How do they get away with it? Because they succeed in dividing us, and they hold a power disparity we cannot counter unless we are fully united in humane solidarity, as a polity, and refuse to take sides in any war or allow our children to be enlisted.
Who has the power, who wields the power, for what purpose, with what outcomes for the population and our shared commons?
The thorny matter of an intentionally constructed historical Social and Material Power Disparity being exploited - causing great harm to the disempowered, the vulnerable population of ordinary folk, and our shared environment raises its ugly head.
Chop! Chop! Here we go.
I read history. I grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in Ireland.
I studied the history of empires from Sumer through to the British Empire. The Irish had a reason to teach this history to their children. Empire has scarred our land, our people long time. And yet Peace in Northern Ireland was made to happen, mostly by ordinary women and men working together, from all the divided sides, seeking to end the divisions the political hierarchy creates. It is a work in progress.
I understand the dynamics of cultural hierarchies of violence. I understand why violence is utilised - it serves as enforcement of dominance, suppressing all actual or perceived threats.
The there's the cultural memes - The Warrior Gene, strategies for mating, violent men as ‘protectors’, women as their grateful servants, conjugal rights - these are all part of a deliberate set up, an anti-social system maintaining the constant threat, with frequent proven examples to let everyone know the capacity for extreme violence is close by, that it has been deployed, and that it can be deployed, and probably will be deployed. And there’s nothing the ordinary person can do about it.
The data tells us the violence is cyclical. Again and again and again - the data tells us the deployment of organised violence is cultural.
Social conditioning and education drive consumers towards dystopian movies, reenactments and novels, predictions of Armageddon, all of which deliberately romanticise the realities of mass violence out of recognition, for a pretty penny and some titillation. Rambo.
Historical knowledge across most carefully ‘educated’ populations is, in all honesty, merely a general or potted knowledge of history, focused on celebrities and national identity, rather than a good understanding of the source data on the lived experience of the most vulnerable among us, as their lives are impacted by the decisions of the most powerful, in the relevant space and time being discussed. The history of Kings and the great and the good is not the history of the people.
The narrative of the good guy doing bad violence for good, the dehumanisation of both in that portrayal.
Violence is always cyclical - the only way to stop the cycle is to cease the violence, start negotiations, and keep talking until it’s done.
It IS that simple, yes, obviously it would be complex to set up and at the same time the only serious complications would be the interference of those who want more war. Whoever they are, right? Not naming any names....
Peace is more than the absence of war.” Wrote Arundhutii Roy
It is certain that the deliberate absence of Militarism is one likely social and material certification of peace.
It is also, importantly, critically so, that Peace include the deliberate absence of poverty, of low wages, of worker exploitation, of environmental degradation, of air, land and water being poisoned.
Peace is the absence of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination, othering, classism and other forms of category aimed abusive behaviour.
It’s all part of what is clearly unhealthy human behaviour.
It’s nonsensical to suggest this degree of unhealthy behaviour is ‘natural’ - it is more precise to say that this unhealthy behaviour is a cultural behaviour. The Dominator Cult.
Peace is a place of health, good health, robust health, empathy, kindness and creativity, with ample capacity to share, learn, nurture. We are evolved for that peace - the peace of the womb must also be set within the peace of the community. The nuclear family is a time bomb.
Whereas when one honestly observes this we can see that the culture itself, as a body of thought, resources, people and material infrastructure in operation over time, is clearly unhealthy, because it has been causing immense harm for millennia, and still is - in spite of the comforts of the middle classes, the poverty of low paid workers feeds the vast wealth of the Oligarchs.
This culture is clearly behaving in a distorted manner, not healthy at all.
Here’s the thing, in spite of all the horror, it is still true and will always be true, that as a species we are evolved to learn - we children can learn healthy relationships from an adult community that is healthy, just as we children learn dysfunctional or coping or shame based relationships if our parents are distressed, wounded , traumatised and coping as best they can, let alone the malicious ‘teachings’ of various spiritual traditions that hold there is a darkness, an evil in us all waiting for an opportunity that can only be prevented by adopting a religious belief system.
You know, we are human - we're sensitive, and thus we are all prone to aches, pains, unhappy moods and feeling hurt.
We adults have a task to build that kind of community where children can learn from healthy adult humans who healthy for the species, a species evolved for deep emotional bonding sustained over many decades, across a community that shares the same habitat, even if some of us are sometimes grumpy, weird, crazy, vulnerable, cross - we learn to regulate our emotional reactions... so that we can respond rather than react.
That’s who we really are. Friends, family, lovers, colleagues, communities.
War is horrific.
Part of my grief is the loss of the egalitarian experience and environment for all of us.
I think about billions of persons, each a warm living beating heart, a warm soft body, a mind, a family, a community that is missing that basic evolved-for state - the egalitarian human - the natural child within a natural community of healthy adults, children and elders, emotionally healthy, physically healthy, barring accidents, or injuries or the odd scuffle or temper tantrum.
We are, after all, only human.
War is horrific.
We have to look at it as it really is.
Stop taking sides... really.
Too many, far too many have stood shivering in trenches, behind defences, preparing to attack, on foot, or defend from their position, having endured a massive artillery barrage or a siege.
Far too many families sheltered as best they could with what little that had, and were found and slaughtered, because they could not run away.
That’s war, young men ordered to move out, to approach the young men on the other side or sides, and kill or capture them. Orders issued by old politicians.
War is reckless barbaric cruelty on an industrial scale. Rich and powerful old men issue the orders.
Orders are to subdue and control the civilian population that survives.
Detect enemy forces hiding in that population and then destroy them. Until they are chased out, and the other side come waging war through that territory. Or the war ends, for now, at least. Kosovo 2023.
Again and again.
Oceans of death, mountains of grief, clouds of cold misery raining upon generation after generation.
Gore. So much gore.
I get a bad feeling when I weigh it all up.
Which is distressing.
And I know this that anything on the horizon of as bad as it gets living through war, surviving, I wouldn’t wish that on my anyone. I have no enemies. You have no enemies. States declare enemies. Religions declare enemies. Ordinary people do not declare enemies. Nobody should ever have to live through warfare.
It ain’t natural.
I think we, the people, we need all of us, to stand in solidarity with all human beings. Only we can heal the dynamic of enemies and Power struggles.
We need to look, without bias, at the human cost of war culture and work out how to prevent war as part of the same task as confronting climate change, poverty, misogyny.
We need to break the spells of propaganda and hope.
We need to let go of all that. We need to say no to the propaganda, all the time. Never let them speak lies and bias without being challenged with honesty and evidence.
We need to look at war as it really is at the human level, to the lived experience of the person caught up within it, whatever their situation within it is.
The lived experience of Survivors of war, told without taking sides, tells us what happens to ordinary people caught up in warfare.
What really happens?
We need to see the reality of war as a culture, a cult that has taken over our peoples - only then will us civilians have the base for the common sense, the human moral courage to commit that we will do this together, all us ordinary people, we will do what ever it will take to make Peace our fundamental cultural value, our human keystone, our social foundation, our infrastructure and our global heart beat.
Hamas combat operations targeted an electronic dance festival in Southern Israel.
Ordinary people, from a global community, dancing in the desert. Oh! the heartbeats, those poor hearts. Those youngsters at a party in the desert.. unspeakable.
Grief beyond any comprehension, shock, visceral outrage. I can’t imagine the terror, the confusion, the chaos, the horror, the grief, the fear, the numbing, the running, the losing one’s way, the falls that fleeing people do, the injuries, the things they saw happen in front go them, the impotence, the power disparity in that moment of dancers facing trained combat groups with automatic assault weapons.
Fleeing knowing others behind you were falling, and being executed…the tears and frustration, the desperate reality of being in that atrocity situation.
War is horrific.
This kind of violence is cultural, and for that reason it is also cyclical. The War Cult thrives because it is always fighting for its survival. It wages war against the peace activists at home and abroad.
Therein lies an area of discussion too real for 21st Century politics.
Change the culture, break the cycles of violence.
THAT is the task.
It is possible, because it is a human task to undo human harm. No god can undo what harm humans cause. Breaking the cycles of trauma and violence is one of the most humanising tasks to which one could commit oneself and one’s community in the long term.
Even if from some angles that claim looks quite ambitious, somewhat improbable and blatantly implausible right now, it must be said, because……..
War is horrific.
The more war violence I see, the more I detest those who enable war as a methodology of power, the more compassion I have for survivors, the more outrage I feel on behalf of us ordinary folk, globally.
Heartbreaking.
