Andrew Brown's Blog in The Guardian - Facing the truth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/pope-benedict-cardinal-bernard-law

"A leader who wished to end the crisis would sack Cardinal Bernard Law "

Andrew Browns Blog 

THE GUARDIAN - March 17 2010 - St. Patricks Day (irony of ironies)

One ought to read this 'opinion' piece very carefully - it is a protective of The Vatican, , it is a clever piece of propaganda, and all the more nasty for that.

"What has driven a great deal of the outrage is the perception that the church placed itself above the secular law. Well it does.AS A GLOBAL INSTITUTION IT MUST. Otherwise it has no more moral worth than Google or News International, or any other multinational which will do business wherever it is profitable. And – especially under the Polish pope John Paul II who fought so hard against communism – the church's moral worth was validated by its utter refusal to bend to the standards of the society around it."

The author Andrew Brown, also implies that the 'scandals emerged' during the 70s and 80s and are over - he ignores the fact that the Residential Schools System worldwide (both Church and State) operates still, has operated for over 100 years, and that in that time, many millions of children have been profoundly harmed, by a culture of abuse thathas been described as endemic.

The Vatican leadership has long been aware of pedophile rings operating within the Church - the recent Ryan Report (2009) and more recently the Murphy Report in Ireland merely serves as one reminder of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_to_Inquire_into_Child_Abuse - The Ryan Report

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_Report - The Murphy Report

The same pattern is repeated across the world. The Last Indian Residential School in Canada was closed in 1996. These were run by Catholic and Protestant Churches, in conjunction with the State.

http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org - Hidden From History : The Canadian Holocaust

The Canadian Social Services have taken over the role of 'assimilation' - Aboriginal Children are 50 times more likely to be fostered than white european children in Canada, and that figure has risen as the Residential Schools were shut down.

http://www.demeterpress.org/untilourhearts.html

Until Our Hearts are on The Ground -

Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth

Edited by D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeannette Corbiere Lavell

White fosterers are paid three times the rate that Aboriginal mothers are paid in State support.

This pattern is seen in all countries where Church and State operated Residential School Systems.

Assimilitation by other means. Social services as a tool of social engineering and 'resource exploitation'. The reason for the forced assimilation is that the lands from which these Aboriginal peoples emerge are rich in 'explotable resources' deemed neccessary for the Economy. 

Uranium, Coal, Oil, Timber, Gold. To access the lands the Aboriginal peoples have to be co-opted or removed.

In Ireland, Australia, the USA and elsewhere, those populations whose children were formerly sent to Residential Schools are now more likley to experience forced removal of children, who are placed in State 'care' or are fostered. The poor, the distressed, the damaged, the Aboriginal.

Andrew Brown is either unaware of these facts, and their implications, in which case his article is lazy; or he is ignoring the facts, in which case he is being ignorant.

And both of these, given the serious nature of the matter, are harmful.

There are many other like Brown, public apologists for what is criminal activity.

They must  be confronted at every turn.

Empathy demands that one NEVER uses another as a means to an end.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Letter Published Examiner Ireland 24 January 2011

Here's a pdf file of letter published in The Examiner, and Irish Daily Broadsheet, based in Cork, Ireland.

The text is as follows :

THE residential school system story and all that goes with it is a far greater crime than the IMF story.

It is a crime in which the Irish State and the Vatican are equal partners. No party in Ireland at present can say it has dealt with this issue decently, honourably. What is it that stops the Irish people from defending the survivors, from demanding that those who protect the Vatican, who indemnify the Vatican and themselves from civil and criminal liability, be brought to account?

One thing I have noticed is the absolute silence on abuses within the elite fee-paying boarding schools which occurred — I know I was there. I am a survivor.

Ireland and its people need group therapy and fast. Without looking at the psychology, the intergenerational patterns of abuse and their effects, without understanding how the abused are forced to 'adapt'  to a situation where abuse is constant, no future Irish government will do any better.

"The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told."

Remember what Judith Herman wrote: “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

David Smail on Depression in 1989

Here's an insightful video, of David Smail, speaking of depression and the woundedness of those who have suffered from circumstances not of their own making.







I urge everyone to view this, to listen carefully to the fullness of what David says. His words are dense with meaning, with empathy and understanding.

Note especially that he says the most sensitive are often the most perceptive. The wounded see Society for what it really is. They are more wounded because of that perceptual ability.

This piece of video was made in 1989, during the height of the Thacherite years... and it has special resoance for these times of 'austerity' for the distressed and wounded, and bonuses for the wealthy....

This video outlines what Alice Miller has shown to be the dynmaics of abuse that are most common, that underpin much of the Dominant Cultures realities, the things that do harm, the kinds of adults those who have not faced their childhood woundings who later inflict those same woundings on others.







This is not to excuse those who cause serious harm, but to understand the dynamics of intergenerational abuse patterns.

Tony Blair can only get away with what he has done, David Cameron is getting away with what he is doing, because so many of us are wounded, blocked and in denial about the nature of our Society.


We must face these truths in order to change the patterns.

Remember what Judith Herman wrote:

"The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told.

Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Aboriginal Peoples and all our Collective Futures.

One of the things that inspires me the most is the message emerging from the Aboriginal Tribal Societies, from all over the Earth, who  have no desire to exact revenge for the brutal and inhumane treatment they have endured for many hundreds of years, treatment that continues to this day.

In Canada and  North America, in Australia, in Africa and South America, in China and in Asia, in Europe Aboriginal Tribal Societies peoples are extant - that is to say still living in their ancient ways - and they are still under threat; people speak easily of the threat to tigers and polar bears, yet there is a community of over 370 million peoples, Aboriginal Tribal Societies, who may well be extinct within the next 50 years.

The Aboriginal Tribal Societies seek an end to that treatment, they seek a full telling of their hidden history and an accounting, a recognition of the harm caused them and some form of reparation and justice; and in all of this they seek to harm no-one.

It is not in their children's best interest to seek revenge, and in many cases this is exactly why they refused to go to war to protect themselves - there is no honour in becoming like the oppressor. Liberation cannot come from behaving like the oppressor.

These peoples have been, and are being discriminated against even as they have been and are being forced into assimilation programs, even as so many died in those programs, even as some few survived and survive today to succeed in the oppressors way of life, even as some were and are being co-opted by the oppressor.

There are divisions within these peoples communities, divisions between those who have been co-opted into the mainstream dominant cultures version of these cultures, (the tourist version) and those who remain true to their traditions, their cultural roots, their languages, their landscapes.

These divisions are being nurtured and exploited by the Dominant Cultures, by Governments and by Churches and by Commercial Interests. The land these Aboriginal peoples are part of (they do not occupy the forest, they are the forest) is viewed as an 'exploitable resource' - and if that calls for the forced or 'accidental' removal of the people, so be it. Just as the forest gets in the way of exploiting the minerals underneath it and must be cut down, so too the people of the forest, the tundra, the plain. This is the price of progress.

A price the dominant culture does not pay. A price the consumer does not pay, and is often unaware of.

And thus, even as they are yet under attack from powerful interests, the Aboriginal peoples seeek to heal those rifts.. And these Aboriginal Tribal Cultures, they demonstrate great fortitude, empathy, honour and compassion which the Dominant Culture would do well to emulate.

Empathy demands that one never uses another as a means to an end.

I urge everyone who reads this blog to review this paper, to get a deeper understanding of the psychological underpinnings of the struggle of the Aboriginal Communities and Societies to assert their rightful place, to protect themselves and the lands thay are part of, in the context of understanding what drives the greed, the desire for progress both of which are symptoms of a deeper issue : a profound lack of empathy.

BODY PLEASURE AND THE ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE

By James W. Prescott

From "The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists", November 1975, pp. 10-20

This paper explores how the disruption of the natural child-mother bonding process, which is a  biologically determined process, and is at the heart of most Aboriginal Societies,  and is related to the emergence of hierarchical power relationships, violence, abuse and the perceived need to dominate.

I am deeply, deeply inspired by the message emerging from the Aboriginal Tribal Societies, from all over the Earth, who  have no desire to exact revenge for the brutal and inhumane treatment they have endured for many hundreds of years, treatment that continues to this day.

This message resonates with my own experience as a survivor of Residential School abuse in Ireland, seeking justice for myself and the many survivors, the wounded. We mean no harm. We do not act in revenge. We will not desist until justice is served, until those structures that abused us are transformed.

That message is that empathy lies at the heart of being human, that the natural child is a gift to all life, and that, of course, there is another way for the people of the dominant culture to live - another way is possible.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

A Primary Skill in Parenting is Empathy.

This piece was written as a comment on 'comment is free' @ The Guardian in response to this article :

The comment was moderated and removed. Here it is in full. For what it's worth.

A primary skill in parenting is empathy.

In a Society that is predicated upon Power Relationships where a power disparity is engineered and maintained between those in Power and those they rule, sensitivity and empathy are often seen as a weaknesses. The ability to manipulate and exploit the vulnerable is seen as a strength.

Empathy for the infant in front of me will depend to some degree upon whether or not I have empathy for myself as an infant, which in turn will be dependent upon how I was treated as a baby, infant, toddler.

This kind of understanding is largely experiential. If we are related to with empathy and sensitivity in infancy, then we are, through that experience, laying down the fundamental behavioural patterns and the physiology and neurology that goes with that experience,  and therefore it tends to persist in later life. It permeates our relationships, and informs how we self regulate our own emotional states. 

If one has no experience of other peoples infants, of being around small children, then the newness of the situation as a parent is quite a challenge. 

It's even more difficult if those 'forgotten' times were in any way adverse.

On top of that, when a parent  has to work full-time plus overtime, whether  a single parent or a couple, if ones income is relatively small, if one are out of work and depressed, if one feels that society is judging you for being out of work, for being relatively poor, if one has Social Services who threaten  rather than offer support, if one's housing is sub-standard, if one lives with a partner who has issues, if you have issues, it's really hard.

And there are many, many people in this state, mostly through no fault of their own.

Poverty is absolutely the result of the concentration of vast wealth in the hands of the few. The rich always blame the poor for being poor. The colonialists always painted the colonised as sub-human. They still do.

The emergence of violence, of hierarchy, of abuse in any society is absolutely linked to the levels of empathy that permeate that society, which in itself is directly linked to the disruption or support of the natural child-mother bonding processes that our biology determines as necessary. Disruption increases the likelihood of dysfunction, support increases the likelihood of well being.

The ACE study shows the clear evidence based links between adverse childhood experiences and later risk behaviour, ill health, addiction and psychological distress.

http://xnet.kp.org/permanentejournal/winter02/goldtolead.html

I was a stressed out parent some 22 years ago, and found myself bullying my children. One day I decided that this had to stop. I sought help, and found it, in the form of a weekly group hosted by a facilitator. 

It was called Parent Link.

It was a co-counselling group, hosted by a facilitator. The group I took part in was 12 women, and myself and my partner. We were the only couple in the group. The others, all mothers, were mostly in relationships and their partners were not seeking help. I found it strange being the only man in the group. The others were very appreciative of my presence, in that it offered hope that more men would participate. They also appreciated that I could cry about my sense of loss regarding the state of my relationship with my children.

There was a lot to learn, and over 13 weeks I learned enough to start the process that has continued ever since.

The first thing I learned was that if I had had ACE's as a child, then it was likely that I would repeat the same patterns, the same controlling behaviours, because that was the unconscious information with which I was operating, in spite of my best intentions, in lieu of accurate information and support.

The next thing I learned helped me to understand that children know what they feel, even infants, and that it requires empathy and some patience to be a healthy carer, to learn how to meet their needs, to read their moods and that it is incredibly frustrating for them when they are unable to communicate and be understood, which is what they are expecting - to be felt, and understood.

I learned how to interrupt my own patterns, to notice when I was becoming irritated and to stop, to relax, and check with the reality of my children's present. I learned that my past had nothing to do with their present. I also learned that some schedules are less important than my children's well-being and that I had to take things at their pace, and that if I wished to be somewhere by a certain time I had to factor in extra time in the preparations, to avoid stressing them out to meet my needs.

These very simple learnings, supported by the group work, over 13 weeks, revolutionised my parenting experience, made life for my children so much better. They helped me end the power relationship dynamic and enter into an empathic relationship.

It also helped me to start the work of dealing with my own past experiences and start to recover.

Better than handbooks is genuine support offered by people who have proven experience, parenting requires time, and the time spent is much more important than the time spent working to pay off a mortgage, to urge forwards a career, to earn enough to have a flatscreen TV the size of a cinema screen or whatever is being touted by the marketers and bankers as the next big thing.

What really concerned me at the time was that there was not one single Government supported programme like the one I was so lucky to have found. Nothing. Zilch.

The question that arose was this : given that this information that was making such a huge impact on my life, on the lives of my children, was known, proven to be effective, had been around for some 20 years why was there nothing like this being offered through any Government or Social Services Programme?

In the end, my answer is this - they don't want to support empathic parenting because it runs counter to their embedded Power Relationships. 

Maybe they just can't see it.

Perhaps it is simply reflexive, perhaps it's psychological myopia, and then again perhaps not. 

Either way it matters greatly to those who are stressed out as parents, because that simple, effective an inexpensive support would make such a huge difference to their lives and the lives of their children.


And for that reason it must matter to anyone concerned with the welfare of Society as a whole.

(Tony Blairs 'evidence' today at the Chilcott Iraq Inquiry is pertinent in that it demonstrates the love of power, the willingness to cause harm and to rationalise that harm. In  a Society predicated on Power Relationships.....)

In the 20 years or so since then I have researched this area and have found nothing at all to counter this answer.

This research paper from 1975 makes this clear.

http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html

If this article makes sense to you, if you feel it, then please share it.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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