Power, Gaza, indifference and compassion

To those who claim that Hamas or any of the resistance groups of the Palestinian nation (who are as the Maquis in France were to the German Occupiers in WWII) are equally to blame for the current war in Gaza I say this. 

When you live on the land, and eat of it’s fruits, drink it’s water, breathe it’s air, excrete your waste (which is manure more than it is waste, it is the return of what is not required, for re-use) you are truly made of that land, therefore you identify with that land and the land owns you more than you own it. 

That is why the Israeli Government pushed the settlement of occupied and annexed lands - they understand the power of that connection to land, to place that is built up by those who work land, whose food, water and air feeds and holds them. 

That’s a thing one protects to the end. The Palestinians in Gaza, once lived in what is now called Israel, and they ate of the land, they drank it’s water, tended the farms and olive groves, the shat on the ground and breathed it’s air - and the land owned them. 

They had been there a long time, time enough for each rock, each blade of grass, each olive tree to be embedded in the specific consciousness of their very lives, and their culture. 

The Palestinians were forced ( like may others in other placers throughout ‘history’ ) starting in 1947, to move from those lands, lands they had lived on for many, many generations, land they were deeply embedded in. Violently. 

Extremely violently. 

By the British Empire and the UK Government and by the Israeli Government. One a proxy for the other. Such is history. 

That violence unresolved, ignored, suppressed begets yet more violence is the dynamic the civilians of these lands are caught up in. Them and their children. And it is Governments that carry out the bulk of the violence. Both the occupiers and the occupied. 

This is the core issue regarding the specifics of the Israeli/Palestine War. 

For many people in the Western urban civilisation, this sense of land, this visceral connection to that which holds life, to that which sustains ones community, is an alien concept. 

For these people this natural relationship is no longer relevant, and is replaced by Nationalism or Ideology, concepts that are abstractions of reality, that exist merely to justify the concepts of centralised power and the ‘management of society’ which have grown out of the European led Industrial Revolution and for which more people have died needlessly, violently than any other single causative factor over the past 2000 years.

Thus the rootless well-schooled urban population fall prey to clever propaganda, and rarely if ever, look any deeper into the problem. If the Times/Sun says it, then it is! This illusion is being finally being dismantled by the net, and independent news outlets such as Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, The Real News, Indymedia and others are providing a much needed public service, funded by grass roots funding. 

So much for State Public Broadcasting! There is much activity around the world across a wide range of areas that is exploring the nooks and crannies of the SYSTEM OF POWER and day by day revealing the agenda of the system, POWER and it’s drivers, as well as working on the psychological and physical processes and memes that have been put in place to support the POWER and protect POWER from dissent and non-compliance. 

 The activities of the militant wings of Hamas are the actions of a desperate few, for whom the burden of daily humiliation, slaughter and indifference (on the part of the 'international community') have become too much to bear. 

That the bulk of Palestinians do their best to be good mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers and good citizens, good doctors, good teachers bears testament to the resilience and innate good-will of people. 

If only that were mirrored by those who claim the leadership roles. If only. 

To those who support the claim that Hamas or any of the resistance groups of the Palestinian nation (who are as the Maqui's in France were to the German Occupiers in WWII) are equally to blame for the current war in Gaza I say this. 

You have been conditioned to accept that others submit to the unacceptable. 

Get over it! 

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

Real Courage ........under fire!

I was sent this video : watch and learn.



http://december18th.org/

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

You Have To Be Asleep

To believe in The American Dream.

The contrast between Ban KI Moons address today from the ruins of the UN Food Distribution Centre in Gaza and Barak Hussein Obama's inaugural speech was clear.

The former expressed a profound loss of words to describe his feelings as he started to take in the full extent of the destruction wrought by the Israeli Military upon a civilian population in crowded into a tiny patch of land, a military that is funded and fully supported by the Government that President Obama now leads.

There was no attempt by Ban Ki Moon to grandstand the occasion, no attempt at hyperbole.

Obamas speech raised less cheers than his actual arrival on the podium, indicating the gulf between hope and real-politik and while replete with well delivered platitudes such as " for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you" : words that the Palestinian People might well utter in reply to the US abstention at the UN Security Council from a vote censuring the Israeli assault upon Gaza, a few weeks ago, even as their homes were being destroyed, only to be followed, day slater, by the destruction of the UN safe havens they were sheltering in!

Early days, give the man a chance - well he had his chance and he chose to remain silent! And he has often stated his support for Israel alongside his condemnation of 'terrorism' and of Iran. He, the leader of a nation that has directly and indirectly murdered 1.3 million Iraqis, not to mention the afghans, vietnamese, chileans, bolivians, peruvians, indonesians and countless others who have died by US made weaponry, weapons whose triggers were pulled by US/UK proxie Governments!

You have to be asleep to believe in the American Dream!



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

POWER, Psychological Distress and Society

"Hardly any of the 'symptoms' of psychological distress may correctly be seen as medical matters. The so-called 'neuroses', 'psychoses' and related forms of suffering 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."

From David Smail......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Smail_(psychologist)

My Comments :

That adverse POWER, when exercised over any other living being, is at the roots of psychological and much physical distress should be blindingly obvious.

Recent events in Gaza are surely evidence enough, given the bland platitudes of political leaders, the cowardice of mainstream media, the bigotry of various citizens and the willful ignoring (verb) of human suffering by these various actors, not to mention what we know of our history and of the genesis of and use of so-called 'scriptures' as tools of control, rather than inspirational texts.

Yet all too often that is not the case!

What in the name of all that is good and beautiful that is of life is going on here?

Education, Psychiatry, Religion, Economics and Ideology as we know them in our society all share this quality of the exercise of adverse power over others. Of ignoring the true and terrible consequences of adverse POWER.

The process of denying a child the responsibility for and expression of her or his true feelings is the basis for all of the above, and in my mind, is the basis for all that is corrupt in our world. Corrupt in this context means isolated from the dynamic equilibrium inherent in what we call nature.

That dynamic equilibrium is at the core of the adpative ability of natural beings - an ability to read intelligently the multiple changes of any environment so as to retain optimum living balance. This implies an innate feedback process of cognitive understanding in order to function. That this exists and permeates all living systems is understood by science (at last), has been understood by indigenous peoples for millenia and is probably understood by all life forms - the indigenous peoples have said time andf time again that their knowledge of herbs, of plant and animal life comes direct from those life forms.

We know, for example, that there are 14,550 natural varieties of apple indigenous to England - that speaks volumes to the specificity of adaptation to locale, precise adaptation to subtle changes in environemnt that occur as the land flows. Similar variations account for the immense bio-diversity of the rain forests etc etc and that variety also affords these living systems their fundamental resilience.

Adverse POWER by it's very nature is an impediment to that feedback process. De-forestation as opposed to harvesting what has fallen. One cannot eat the fruit of a felled tree or nor the berries of a burned bush.

And that is at the core of the problems we are all faced with. POWER most often assumes that because others do not speak POWERS language that POWER is somehow superior. That is the meaning of 'experts' such as Lawyers, Priests, Rabbis, Imans, Psychiatrists etc etc. When in fact it is POWERS inability to empathetically connect and integrate feedback that is the problem.

We learn at home, in school, in our temples and at work that feedback is not appreciated - don't talk back! - and that such honest feedbcak can in fact be life/career threatening. And so we shut down that process within ourselves, and that leads directly to distress. Blocking our own internal flows of sensory information is deeply harmful.

The solution to this problems is so simple that it is overlooked by most of us. Certainly those in POWER, denigrate this approach in favour of over-complicated jargonised instituionalised narratives that are designed to "blind us with brilliance of baffle us with bullshit" and thus retain that adverse POWER. Psychiatry, Pharming, 'Experts' etc etc......... all wish to justify their positions......

The solution, as I see things, is ruthless self-honesty in the personal, familial and societal arenas of our lives and within our culture, founded upon an understanding and experience of Love as a joyful awareness of the wonder of being a living creature. Such an awareness can also be described as an expression of sensory acuity. It would naurally extend itself to all life.

Sensory acuity based around joyful awareness will always be sensitive to even the most subtle changes in the environment, and that in turn enables cognitive intelligent responses to those changes - sensory acuity is 'de facto' a neccessity so that this essential feedback loop process can function.

Here's a link to an article that I found useful, regarding the basis for a thankful life, written by Dr. Peter Breggin...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/fifteen-principles-of-lif_b_34782.html



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Compulsory State Education exposed ........

The fundamentals of State Control and the true agenda of Compulsory State Education (schooling) are revealed by the following quotations

Charles Pierce, the eminence grise behind William James and John Dewey, architects of Compulsory State Education in the USA wrote :

“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of the will of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed.

Let all possible cause of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehension. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard … unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence….

Let a list of opinions be drawn up to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”

Woodrow Wilson speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909 :

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

This is the technology of modern management ……this is the doctrine which drove William James in “Principles of Psychology” (1890), to assign habit-training, not intellectual development, the place of honour in schooling :

“Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what … saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor … it alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive (jobs) from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different strata of society from mixing.”

All of us who attended state schooling have been exposed to and conditioned to accept the imposed and limited ideas that are taught through that education, reinforced through the media and that underpin the success of marketing.

This is the core technology of psychological state control upon which the likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron and the leaders of Indusrty et al depend upon.

Of course they retain that other oh-so familiar stick, that of poverty, physical violence or imprisonment to curtail those few who escape this conditioning. That’s what the War Against Terror and the consistent attack on civil liberties is all about.

Reminding you and I that ‘we are either with us or against us”. And that there are penalties for non-compliance. You will be excluded!

With thanks to John Taylor Gatto, in whose most recent book, "Weapons of Mass Instruction", I found these and other quotes and resources.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

Gattos book, "An Underground History of American Education" is published on-line at his website. In it he researched the international project to establish Compulsory State Education, from it's roots in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to the 21st Century.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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