We are told the Taliban are Evil. They are not alone: Johnson, Blair and Bush et al, they are all in the same club.

Greta Thunberg wrote:

"You say you hear us, and that you understand the urgency... if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe."

I have to say, she'd better believe it. We all should, really. 

It is not a negative approach to acknowledge harmful behaviour as harmful. It is, in fact, a hugely positive step as it is the first step towards resolving the problems caused by the harmful behaviour.

Our collective, cultural and individual refusal to admit, to acknowledge, to accept and integrate the evidence all around us, to understand what the corruption, the bloody wars, the environmental destruction really means - the evidence that our rulers and their sponsors are engaged in evil behaviours - is our weakest point. 

We dare not go there.

We will not be able to generate the international co-operation needed to create and apply adaptive strategies that help meet the evolving dynamics of climate change, that cease harmful toxifying industrial and agricultural practice, that start the processes of repair and recovery until we confront and cease the war mongering. This is clear. All war is evil, all war is abuse of power.

We install eco-lightbulbs hoping that will be enough. We recycle, we re-use, fingers crossed. We hope and we pray. We drive a Tesla car. Faint hope. Delusion.

Everyday evil is not dramatic, it is banal. It wears a suit, a neatly ironed shirt, sports boyishly tousled hair, wears a charming smile to mask lying eyes. Evil is looking at a bank balance or a power advantage and judging that to have more value than a human life, than the environment, than the well being of others.  That decision is evil. Adopting that stance and maintaining it is evil.

Evil is normalised.

Evil is normalised, so much so we do not see it. In order to see evil, we must know what it is. 

Evil is consciously allowing, enabling or otherwise permitting avoidable un-necessary harm in order to maintain wealth advantage and power disparity over others. Externalised costs are the very definition of evil. Somebody else pays the price.

It is evil to test cosmetic formulations on captive animals in order to assess how much of the toxic compound can be used, or what toxicity levels one can get away with human use of the product. 

There is no need whatsoever to use toxic chemical compounds in any products for use by any person, except for profit. Those tests are protecting future profits, rather than protecting human beings. The captive animals bear untold and intolerable suffering, for shareholder gain. That is evil behaviour.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Vietnam

Excellent, honest and insightful interview with MP Clive Lewis, an Afghan War veteran who shows more humane leadership in this segment, than Sir Keir Starmer has shown since he joined the Labour Party.



Twenty years of war upon Afghanistan, so much violence, nothing to show for it except the prospect of more violence.

Honest history in all our schools would go a long way towards preventing the grass roots population from being manipulated or groomed into accepting war as a tool of State policy, and would undoubtedly help to reduce Xenophobia, Racism and Misogyny.

Hypocrisy

Blair, a proven liar and war criminal walks free, on a generous state pension, whilst Julian Assange, an honest journalist,  rots in a prison cell, held under false charges.

Afghanistan never needed the USUK or NATO to guide it's progress. 

As Naomi Aldort wrote: "Our children do not need us to shape them, they need us to respond to who they are."

The same applies to sovereign countries. Conquest, NeoColonialism, and the urge to force other cultures to adopt the culture of a dominating State is a negative malign influence, and undermines global efforts at peace and co-operation.

The truth about the Establishments hatred of Corbyn is this : the evidence of the past 20 years implicates a significant cohort of the English Establishment, as war criminals, who prosecuted those awful horrific wars, and who knew what they were doing was both amoral and illegal, though it did enable a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary tax payers to already obscenely wealthy oligarchs who donated heavily to the politicians, buying influence. That is evil behaviour.

Lowkey has a spot on take here.

That is a dishonourable legacy.

Evil is human action, human behaviour, more, nothing less. That means it is tractable, it is something we can confront, challenge and impede, and indeed prevent. Here Rory Stewart lays out a perspective that criticises the action of one American president, without taking the whole into consideration. He even suggests maintaining a foreign military presence in other people's lands is a virtue. It is not a virtue.

"Biden can't say the Afghans are cowards. He left them behind."@RoryStewartUK tells @OliDugmore western leaders have only themselves to blame for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/qJEPY77no1

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) August 19, 2021

It is an evil. But Stewart's eloquence masks the evil, by pointing at just one aspect of the evil. He is correct that the way this withdrawal has been handled has exposed Afghanistan's civilian population and civil infrastructure to greater risk than need be - but he does not acknowledge that the USUK/NATO presence in Afghanistan is also a much greater evil. 

The unexciting banality of everyday evil.

War is almost always about someone making a killing.

$10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defence contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295.

"Several commentators address this dynamic in the 2005 documentary “Why We Fight,” about a warning that President Dwight Eisenhower issued about the military-industrial complex. Former CIA contractor and academic Chalmers Johnson states, “I guarantee you, when war becomes that profitable, you’re going to see more of it."

source: https://theintercept.com/2021/08/16/afghanistan-war-defense-stocks/

Concentrated Wealth is the most powerful political collective among the developed nation states. 

War is not cheap.

The political power of Concentrated Wealth is based upon externalising costs.

Somebody else pays the price. Leveraging power to dump the costs onto others is evil.

Boris Johnson's behaviour evil. Read a list of his decisions that burdened others with the cost of his egoic avarice.

Tony Blair's behaviour is evil. There were no WMD in Iraq, and even if there had been, the War of Aggression against Iraq would still have been amoral, and illegal.

Jacob Rees-Mogg behaviour is evil. Food banks are indeed graciousness, yet the policies that created the need were one's he pursued, with others for a decade. Uplifting indeed!

The behaviour of Taliban  1.0 was evil. Theocracy always is.

The behaviour of the Saudi Regime are evil. Theocracy always is. Others pay the price.

The behaviour of the Vatican is Evil. Theocracy as a political hegemon always is. They protect their power at immense cost.

The grooming of 'Incels' as a violent political misogynist movement is evil. Grooming always is.

behaviour of NATO is evil. War is dishonour on every measure. Nobody wins in war. War is a losers enterprise.

Nigel Farage's behaviour is evil. Grooming always is. Exploiting vulnerabilities in other people is evil.

Keir Starmer's behaviour is evil. Sending children into schools, to spread the virus, in spite of the available evidence proving that it was unsafe to do so. No ifs, no buts.

Jacinda Ardern's behaviour is not evil. She places empathy at the centre of her policy decision making.

Donald Trump's behaviour is evil. The art of the steal, the grift, the con, the grooming of vulnerable people.

Obama's behaviour as an American President prosecuting multiple wars  is evil. Drone warfare expanded, killing more and more civilians. Funding violent militia in Libya and Syria. Supporting war against Yemen. And he is charming, urbane has a wide smile. So what?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's behaviour is not evil. Empathy for the vulnerable modulates her policy deliberations. She seeks to prevent harm.

Darren Grimes behaviour is evil.  Grooming other people through their vulnerability always is.

Noam Chomsky's behaviour is not evil. He has always spoken truth to Power, properly researched and ruthlessly accurate, he has never faltered.

Katy Hopkins's behaviour is evil. Grooming always is. 

Patrick Fagan's behaviour is evil. Grooming always is. A psychologist who misuses his knowledge to exploit vulnerable people.

Gabor Mate's behaviour is not evil. He presents the evidence of socially induced trauma's adverse affects on vulnerable folk, to raise awareness and suggest  ways to recovery and prevention. He does this diligently.

Most ordinary folk, most of humankind are not evil.

Most of us ordinary folk are caught in the cross fire of systemic evil, and most of  us are trying out very best to get by, doing the best we can by ourselves and their families. Most of us ordinary people are innocents thrust into this mess by accident of birth. There's also a significant cohort who are actively trying to counter evil, attenuate the impacts of evil, a constituency of helpers and protectors and healers and pragmatic activists.

And yes, there are evil folk among us too.

The US and UK Military Command (one could argue - all military commands) are, at best, at a rather long stretch, and I am being really, really generous here, decent enough people who are manipulated by evil people, if not evil in and of themselves.

If, at best, they are decent people manipulated by evil, then they are not that intelligent, they are not that brave, they are not really courageous nor are they worthy of their status. They enable the evil rather than challenge the evil. Whose freedoms do they wage war for?.

These people and these powerful hierarchy of violence organisations are all examples of liars and lies that are institutionalised to permit avoidable harms to happen, which do not prevent harm at source, which do so for their personal and institutional gain.

I do understand that for combat veterans this is a huge problem.

Imagine the trauma of extensive violent combat, tour after tour of shocking violence, carrying that, enduring that because you believe you were serving a decent cause? But it was a lie.

To admit that you were manipulated and groomed into performing the most horrific acts of violence, repeatedly, under the pretence that they were fighting for 'freedom' would be too much to bear, alone. 

To turn to civilians who praise 'the sacrifice of our brave men and women' and say 'you are being misled by really evil people' who misled me and convinced me to do intolerable harm to others, my hands are bloodied, my spirit is tainted, my mind seared with agonising violence, my heart is broken.

To say to civilians, to those who love you, that your praise is a denial of what really happens, your concept of our bravery is a lie, your desire to believe in that lie no longer protects us - that is too much to bear.

For us civilians to hear that, to bear the burden with the combat veterans, to accept some shared responsibility for that immense sorrow, to admit that our brothers and sisters never fought for our freedoms, to admit we too were manipulated and exploited, and to understand that we too must sit with the trauma, the pain, the sorrow, the grief and then we must resolve to take action to prevent this from ever happening again.

That is courage above and beyond anything we know of.

There is immense grief here. Immense loss. Unspeakable pain and sorrow, masked by stoic perseverance and resilience, obscured by coping and mere survival - all of which is exploited wilfully by really evil people and really evil organisations.

If  the Taliban are evil, they are no more or less so than the USUK and NATO organisations they have been waging war with for the past 20 years,

The only way to cease war is to wage peace, and peace is more than the absence of war.

Peace can only start with the absence of lies. We must face the truth, which is simple, complex and is also complicated. None of this will be easy. Doing nothing is not easy either.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is a total cultural shift.

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 healthy egalitarian pre-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 book Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology and 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.

Source : Office for National Statistics 2019

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. 

I have also been inspired and informed by the written work of superb researchers in the areas that my experience drew me to - people such as Alice Miller, Judith Herman, Robert Sapolsky, Vincent Felletti, Carl Rogers, Oliver James, Sue Gerhardt, David B Chamberlain, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Allan Schore, David Smail, Suki Pryce, Rutger Bregman, James W Prescott, John Bowlby Colm O'Gorman and many, many others - there is a list on the side bar of this blog, an incomplete list, and it gives a flavour of my 'scholarship' which has been and remains an informal, self directed process of study and learning.

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.

Peace is more than the absence of war.

9 September 2014 - United Nations Statement

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.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2010/10/two-poles-of-society-everything-in.html

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.

Kindest regards
 
Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Remembering : All War is Child Abuse.

all war is child abuse

a poem for 1919 - 2019

"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."

It is also a song.

I try to 'remember' aware that I am placed within an historical context, a point between what has happened and what will happen, in the present, the place of happening, which is here and now.

I am aware I am here because so many organisms have lived, nurtured and died.

We are all here as a result of the evolution of  living systems.
 
And in this time, Remembrance Sunday in particular, I turn towards every ancestor ever murdered in warfare, every family bombed out of their home, every child shot in the back in flight, the terror, the pain, the loss, the grief, the disgust, the shame, the guilt, the denial, the survival, the hatred and so much else that has distorted human lives down through the wounded generations across the Earths lived in spaces, everywhere, for all time, the remembered and the forgotten.

All of that vast lived experience of terror, pain, shock, disgust.

It's a lot of peoples lives totally fucked up beyond all recognition.

It's real. It is not abstract.

I allow myself to begin to imagine the terror, the feeling, the sense of going through all of that, and I am already shattered, momentarily.  This is terrifying, when I really allow it in. It is also huge - an immense sadness, grief and dismay beyond all comprehension.

I am glad that I am only imagining, that for me this is a kind of mental and emotional thought feeling experiment.

I imagine that then multiplied million upon million fold, ordinary folk caught up in the wars of the powerful, as in WWI and WWII, the wars of colonial conquest, of indigenous annihilation.

The survivors PTSD interwoven with trying to make ends meet as a  slave, an indentured worker, a beggar, a low wage worker-labourer, a shopkeeper, a cobbler, a doctor, whatever.

I think about how that trauma and poverty 'informed' or conditioned all those lives of the centuries of warfare, and in relation to my own immediate ancestors in Ireland during the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s

Traumatised parents doing their best, yet passing on the woundedness, the loss, the behavioural dynamics on unresolved trauma.

I try to see through to the ripples of effect and affect. I try to see how all of that ripples through to today, how it afflicts the present, from 100 years ago and more, millennia of war fare.

15,000 years of Civilisation  and Warfare.

And the thing is this - go back 30,000 years or 60,000 years and we see very, very little evidence of any Monumental Institutional Culture, now evidence of any Hierarchy of Violence Culture.

Kings, Palaces, Pyramids all unknown.

We know that outside the areas of 'civilisation' the vast majority of sustained cultures were egalitarian cultures built for conflict resolution, de-escalation of aggression, carrying on trade.

We know that nomadic, migratory, pastoral, horticultural, fisher-hunter-gatherers in the large part maintained healthy attachment bonding between mother and child - social cultures where nurture is highly valued, more valued than power.

War is a culture, rather than a sequence of discrete events innate to human nature.

WWI cannot be studied within it's start and finish timelines and be understood.

It was another ripple in the culture of competing militarised industrialised states - the rights and wrongs of WWI are a gaslighting exercise. The issue is the culture of warfare as a political utility, which itself emerges from hierarchy of violence culture - God the wrathful, who loves you, The Murderous State that will punish you, the dominant all powerful parent.

Ending the warfare culture is the work of all honest, free adults.

Human Welfare is our business here, not Warfare. 

There was no sacrifice, nothing was won, the bland lies of polished brass, marching to order, wreaths and ceremony are in truth a private memorial attended by  some few loyal Survivors, co-opted by the Chiefs of Staff and their political masters for political advantage.

Let me clarify.

The people who lived through the combat and destruction have a fraternal duty and a human  need to remember, to bear witness to what happened, to grieve, to cry, to stand in stoic grace and to somehow integrate their experience, and be held, lovingly.

They also need full support to deal with their wounds, they deserve help in every possible way no questions asked. They rarely receive this because to acknowledge these wounds fully would be to expose the mythos of war as a sham.

And most of all they need the civilians to ensure that the politicians never, ever send future generations to go to war off shore.

I wear both poppies,  and none.

I cannot dismiss the survivors of warfare on any side, their wounds are real, and they are victimised by those who urge warfare, by those who glorify warfare in order to condition others to habituate to warfare.

"Peace is more than the absence of War." - Arandhuti Roy

War is only possible if a culture permits child abuse.

It requires an organisational effort to prepare children for the eventuality of  war.

Indoctrination is pretty central to the successful prosecution of warfare,and enforcement of conquest, and ought be understood as a grooming behaviour that has been institutionalised, weaponized and deployed, in effect if not always on concert.

All war is child abuse, child abuse is war.

The vast resources deflected away from nurturing happy healthy families, safe communities and thus functionally sound societies deprives every child of those societies, and is a form of indirect child abuse.

The training of youngsters to become combat troops, to become something that they can have no experience of; the deliberate, methodical organised killing of warfare, and it's disorganisation in the field.

They have to break the youngster and rebuild, re-condition and in effect brain wash that youngster as part of a group going through the same abusive training that it's their togetherness that matters, so they all push through, as a habit, as an emotional reaction.

This is typically done between age 16 and 22 whilst the frontal cortex of the brain is still developing, whilst the young persons brain is still vulnerable to adverse environmental influence.

."probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex—the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms.

To hark back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn’t take a particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a punch.

But it takes a fancy, environmentally malleable frontal cortex to learn culture-specific rules about when it’s okay to throw punches.”

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Talking to children about Heaven and Hell is terrorism, if you can see it honestly, for what it is, without judgement, as a anti-biological cultural behaviour pattern.

To insert into the child's mind the existential fear of his or her own 'soul', or 'self' based on a fable through reward/sanction behaviour modification dynamics that internalise the external values into the child so that the child believes those values to be his or her own.

Terror, fear and Hope.

Look at it that way and then the behaviour can be addressed.

It's again the pattern of intruding into the child's psyche.

Colonialism.

"We do not need to shape our children, rather we need to respond to who they are."

The fear the child will not choose the Religion or System on their own is great, and is a reflection of the insecurity of all dogma, all doctrine, all religious zeal and practice.

Same thing, different appearance.

Healthy people do not go to war.

And so it goes..

The culture routinely, and understandably, ignores the meaning of the harms caused - we avoid the intensity and intimacy of each act of violence, each death moment is masked out.

They lost their lives is uttered rather than they were murdered for political power.

Yet each thing like that existed, and they continue to exist, and there is no balance, no resolution to that death. We cannot claw back the life that has been utterly destroyed.

Thus the historians and school masters utter numbers, statistics, miles gained or lost, and they  speak of generals, and heroes, and the villages in between are invisible - the deaths are less than notable.

Just numbers. Just numb.

And so the war habituated people will quote such information in repetition, having 'learned' the official narrative, euphemism to mask the immensity of individual suffering, repeated in unspeakable intensity, by the millions, re-presented as historical sentiment  via caricature that brings tears to the eyes, the emotions of national sacrifice so carefully tended.

That's a big ask to feel into that immense well of pain, grief, desperation, it's so much easier to take the heroic stance.

But we need to feel into that to really understand why in a fully embodied sense we must cease our states engaging in warfare.

Hence my latest release* - All War is Child Abuse.

*See and hear above!

My argument is simple.

The indoctrination that is central to the prosecution of War is child abuse.

Organised, Institutional invasive psychological grooming to exploit that child-adult for violent political activism - that's what soldiers are.

They are the tactical violent utility of the ruling class.

They wage war for political masters.

The waste of materials and wealth and human time, from extraction industries, to weapons makers, then the destruction wrought by warfare consumables 'market' - all of it is global child abuse.

I get that many millions of folk have lived experience of this in ways i do not, in ways I would never want to experience and that I am not 'expert' here...

I am looking at all the elements and I find nothing that exists that balances the harms experienced.

Nothing.

Nothing in war that I would 'endure' to serve Humanity. Nothing I would ask any other to bear to 'save' Humanity...

It's bullshit to claim there is glory, goodness, heroism, sacrifice in war - those are all after the fact rationalisations or pre-fight fantasies.

The exploitation of the hyper-adrenalenised traumatised wounded survivors trying to make sense of it all.

Nobody wins war.

As I understand it 'losses' in war are in fact the numbers of people murdered by a system of power, be they troop or civilian, adult or child, volunteer or conscript.

Murders, not losses.

Losses to the organising agencies, whose concern with numbers of troops is rather obvious.

To go after troops who murdered people in Iraq and to avoid going after the men who organised and funded and prosecuted an invasion and war against another state?

That is an appalling act of deliberate hypocrisy, because that failure to indict known War Criminals is part of what enables War Makers to get away with it. They never go to jail.

Colonialism and Conquest.

I find it  appalling that the majority of Europeans cannot 'see' what Colonialism really costed, and still costs,

How can they not understand that a cruel dynamic generated the wealth and status we Europeans now stand on, which we were born into,

I find it appalling that we British are not strong enough to arrest our White European Christian War Criminals.

Blair is free and that indicts the entire Western European polity, straight up.

Bush is free, and that indicts the entire Industrial World. Straight up.

I say this - We remember and we must prevent or it is just nostalgia and cover-up, which is very, very stinky evil.

Go on, then, televise and broadcast the old men of 'yesterdays wars' tearing up, the young men in fresh uniform, the disabled veterans, the bugle, the wind, the seriousness of the moment, the standing, lots of standing.

But if they go to war tomorrow, if we allow our Government to go to war, if we permit venal men and women to fund covert warfare, to supply active combatants in illegal Wars, in effect spreading violence, then it's just a load of political grooming gangsterism.

Just for the show.

It's not a good show.

Remember that as you go.

Remembrance.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

War and the Climate - some rough ideas, an outline.

I am attempting to formulate some policy suggestions on ceasing war as part of the work to cease environmental degradation, pollution, genocide of 'un-developed' cultures and deal with Climate Change...

 

Where I stand: Industrial Hierarchically Violent culture is the problem, CO2 is a symptom, pollution is a symptom, corruption is a symptom.

Humanity is not the problem.

Institutional inhumanity is the problem.

Humanity is the solution.

These two are juxtaposed in this one photo op.

Thus the matter has psycho-social elements, as much as practical, technical and material elements.

My suggestions at this early stage:

1. War Crimes indictments in the all countries engaging in war, supported by the vast bulk of the home tax paying population, their judiciaries, Faiths, the UN and the ICC.

Confront the war makers, hold them to account will prevent future politicians from war making.

1.a Reparations - support all the countries and communities damaged by war. If the war making states indict their war criminals it will send a solid proof of our willingness to be peaceful. Thus punitive reparations would be un-necessary, as the wrong doers in chief have been held to account. We should still make reparation, or restorative justice a key element in our response to war making damage.

For example, Europe could repurpose, send and budget for housing building operations, as support for those Syrian and Libyan communities afflicted by Western sponsored violence, so that they can return as soon as is feasible to a safe social and economic environment. (see 2 below).

2. Dismantling the Military Industrial Financial Political complex, and coverting all military into land workers and rescue/support services for anywhere adversely affected by intense storms, droughts, sea rises...Nurturing Heroes who build and make safe, rather than destroy.

3. Permaculture everywhere, especially in urban areas. Organic clean foods as the standard. Transition from where we are to clean food futures must be managed carefully, always bearing in mind the food security of the people, locally and nationally.

Remove all combustion engines (particulates end up in food, in foetus blood and in food products grown around frequent combustion use) - thus to grow food in urban areas demands removal of combustion engines...

3.b Put people back onto the land to nurture it - Permaculture is human labour intensive in the initial stages.

Once established, the management of that land, and the harvesting of food products will be need to be done by hand, rather than by machines. We can wholly avoid plastics in the food industry. We can shorten distance travelled by food, from growing areas to consumers.

We will need people on the land who are intimate with it's dynamics and who can spot trends and take appropriate action in advance. We will need those people to be forming happy communities, geared to producing clean food as the primary 'profit'

We will find a cohort willing to leave cities to do all of this. We do not have to 'impose' it, or order folk to move. There are in many places sound peasant cultures who would take up this project....

Local and National Food System Resilience...

3.c Protect all indignenous, aboriginal, pre-development lands from any further incursions, and listen to their relational wisdom, and learn from them. 

Drop the hubris of Industrial Civilisation and GDP as a measure of human progress - it does not represent human relational progress. It represents the acquisition and concentration of wealth as a politicial hegemon.

3.d Reforestation, rather than mono species plantation systems, although there will be areas where that can work, we need natural diverse forests to return...

4. End holiday flights, cruise ships etc - all energy intense long distance consumer leisure travel to be eliminated until we have clearly clean methods to support such activity...

4.a Shorten working hours, give more time for holidays so that people can have extended time with family and community in their home places.... meet new people, relax and enjoy free time in their own communities...

5. Cradle to Cradle roll out on ALL industrial processes.

This means redesigning all industrial processes such that the materials and resources are resourced sustainably, and are turned into products that can be recycled, re-used, bio-degraded to become nutrients for further use, or to be returned to ecosystems as nutrient, and that there are no toxic outputs, or 'externalised costs' borne by the ecosystem..

In addition, 100% reuse of all metals, woods, etc... once a product has reached end of life, it must be recycled. There are billions of tons of scrap metal...

6. All profits from industry to be ploughed back into making the changes, rather than feeding shareholders income portfolios, until such time as a balanced system has emerged an is well established..

7. Making indoctrination of children a Crime against Humanity.

7.a Abolishing poverty,

Indoctrination is a huge driver in war making, as is poverty - both condition youth in different ways to volunteering in Military Combat Units as a 'good idea'.

8. Reuniting age split communities.... we need to take care of each other, not put each other into care.... rebuild multigenerational community everywhere... again time within our communities nurturing each other..

9. Universal Basic Income as part of abolishing poverty worldwide...

10. Trauma Informed care and preventative practice to be established in all services, all education systems, all policing and all regulatory systems that interface between institutional power and the individual.

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. 

News Media, Our Billions, Their Billions, Blair indicted? who is in charge here?

This life is a jam, not a rehearsal.

We are sensitive, because that is how biology grows... through sensitivity.

Being bullied undermines sensitivity, always.

I understand that live in a Violent Hierarchy, where large powerful groups of people and institutions wage war, often through proxies, militarily, economically, culturally and ideologically seeking degrees of 'full spectrum dominance.'

That is not Healthy.

At all.

On any level.

It's bio-illogical.

Nature or Living systems are not competitive fora,  they are all fully fledged mutli layered co-operating diversities.

--

The historical situation of emerging from within oppression, to resist and recover full health.

That is 'where' we are.... the 'when' is always now.

So here's a behavioural over-view, a massive generalisation, yet I think one that is helpful as a focussing tool

It is understood, that in some cases, some traumatised or brutalised or neglected children or individuals can learn dysfunctional behaviours, thought sets; and in turn they craft controlling mechanisms to manage a chaotic life, which are internalised and later on expressed in the will to control others to meet perceived needs of the controlling, wounded party.

This will influence the children born to such a parent, so as to habituate the next generation to hierarchy, power, violence as normal...unconsciously... behaviourally.

So too with communities.   Suspend all judgement, just for the next few paragraphs amd walk with me a little, as I explain.l

What can happen to a family to turn it into a dysfunctional unsafe place is scaled up at the State level.. the same dynamics, different expressions due to size, complexity etc... both bad situations..

Europe is littered, as is every other continent, littered with traumatmised and marginalised communities, oppressed by more powerful communities..We call the States and 'demographics' - everything is expressed as socio-economic status...

The existing system is rooted in bullying, in hierarchies of power.

It has everywhere attack the egalitarian pre-conquest cultures. None have been spared. Contact with industrialised peoples leads to extinction...

It is to be expected that leaders and ruling groups within this Competing Powers set-up are violent operators.

Concentrated private Wealth has always been the primary political party, (we call them the Oligarchy) and it was they who first replaced the Kings, and it was they who opened and maintained Parliaments of Owners,  and who pursued general Education by the State, and the financing of wars via Taxation and borrowings, and later on, after WWI and II, they ceded limited powers to Democratic assemblies, begrudgingly..

Now, they - the owning class, the Oligarchy - are clawing back more of that power, and wealth which the believe is theirs by right, and by the might of their billions, and so it goes.

Until someone decides the break the cycle in his or her life...

Until many choose that, quietly, robustly and then choose solidarity...

The Billionaires have their billions - we tax payers have ours, and we need to not be fighting each other, divided to vote for which bully we choose to be ruled by.... really...

We need to be using our Billions to regulate the Oligarchy, because their businesses all operate within the commons, and must be forced to be honest, transparent and safe for the commons. It really is that simple.

That's how we can frame the next step in Democracy...

---Some days I think that the news media's role is to deliver stress to our brains.

And distraction, entertainment, fine.

Honesty about power, the kind that makes a robust man laugh - not a chance!

Then I remember the Worshipful Company of Stationers (and Newspaper Makers), the Star Chamber and censorship of printed materials in 14th Century England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Stationers_and_Newspaper_Makers

--- War and News Makers...

Nuremberg.

the ultimate legal, criminal responsibilities lie with those who ordered the war.

Given that to marshall the logistics for war is a deliberate and complex operation, why did the citizens not act to prevent the politicians from committing War Crimes, at that stage?

The preparation of an illegal war is as much a war crime as the rest ....once combat commences, there is no way to undo...

it is not logic, nor is it advisable though it is common to undict a trooper and not have the troopers entire command chain in the dock with him.

If a War Crime occurred, then the FULL picture of command liability is essential in confronting what took place, and how...the context must be understood, not to mitigate, nor to deflect, but to focus liability where it is...

We NEED this information in the public domain, in order to be able to prevent it from happening

It has to be that future military commanders whould understand that any time a politician issues an illegal order, they have the duty reject the order, then to arrest that politician, and hand him or her to the custody of the Civil State.

It has to be that following illegal orders breaks the millitary code, and the order issuer can be arrested by the subordinate.

Illegal military orders ought be seen as treason against both the home people and the target peoples...

If we truly want peace, we must be robust about it.

Arrest Blair, Cameron, May - see who wants to go to war after that.

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.