One of the oldest excuses for war is that the enemy is irredeemably evil. He worships the wrong god, has the wrong skin and language, commits atrocities, and cannot be reasoned with. The long-standing tradition of making war on foreigners and converting those not killed to the proper religion "for their own good" is similar to the current practice of killing hated foreigners for the stated reason that their governments ignore women's rights. From among the rights of women encompassed by such an approach, one is missing: the right to life, as women's groups in Afghanistan have tried to explain to those who use their plight to justify the war. The believed evil of our opponents allows us to avoid counting the non-American women or men or children killed. Western media reinforce our skewed perspective with endless images of women in burqas, but they never risk offending us with pictures of women and children killed by our troops and air strikes.
(The desecration of Martin Luther King--especially around the time that his birthday is celebrated--is one of my major objects of antipathy and scorn. I'll have more to say myself on Monday. This gift just fell into my lap. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
According to the Pentagon's lawyer, Martin Luther King Jr., if alive today, would view the US war on Afghanistan as both the act of a Good Samaritan and as necessary self-defense.
Jeh C. Johnson, the "Defense" Department's general counsel, said, on the one hand:
"I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack."
On the other hand, he also said this:
"I draw the [Good Samaritan] parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes. [They] have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people. Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968."
Now, when President Barack Obama in 2009 gave a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he had the decency to admit that he was disagreeing fundamentally with King's position:
"There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.'...But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [King's and Gandhi's] examples alone."
(It's a good time to be thinking deeper - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
"the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly"
If anyone managed to come away from Part I: Humans: not just selfish with an overly sentimental view of human nature, this post will rob you of that delusion. Yes, we humans have a remarkably developed faculty for cooperation and group-oriented behavior, in comparison to most other species. That's an encouraging thing to know. And it may even become useful, if you start to identify the conditions that tend to set us up for cooperation. However, as Charles Darwin, David Sloan Wilson, and many others have suggested, the processes of group selection that helped us evolve to be cooperative within our groups probably also encouraged competition (to put it mildly) between groups.
Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson explain in their book, Unto Others:
...our goal ... is not to paint a rosy picture of universal benevolence. Group selection does provide a setting in which helping behavior directed at members of one's own group can evolve; however, it equally provides a context in which hurting individuals in other groups can be selectively advantageous. Group selection favors within-group niceness and between-group nastiness. Group selection theory does not abandon the idea of competition that forms the core of the theory of natural selection...
And here's Wilson again in The New Fable of the Bees: Multilevel Selection, Adaptive Societies, and the Concept of Self Interest:
[Multilevel selection theory] has the capacity to explain the behavior of individuals who demonically work to undermine their groups (within-group selection), individuals who angelically work on behalf of their groups (the bright side of among-group selection) and avenging angels who work on behalf of their groups to destroy other groups (the dark side of among-group selection). We might not like the dark sides of animal and human nature, but they exist and require a theory to explain them. ...multilevel selection theory has the potential to explain the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.
Why do you build me up, buttercup, just to let me down and mess me around? Seriously though, this just underscores that the purpose of this series is to use the lens of evolutionary theory not to idealize but to examine and better understand how humans and groups work, particularly in relation to collective action - and hopefully make practical use of that understanding.
Here's an easy question: would you rather go to jail for a few hours with a bunch of friends or die?
Here's a poorly kept secret: the wars that a majority of Americans want ended are not ending, and the war machine that a majority of Americans want cut back is growing.
To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on November 2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for peace on Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th Congresses have been during the past four years and then measure the ways in which things are likely to become even worse.
Remarks at George Mason University, Fall for the Book, September 23, 2010. (Video available 9-24-2010 at http://warisacrime.org)
Thank you for being here and skipping the Pledge to America event in Sterling.
I'm going to try to be brief because I tend to be very long-winded answering questions, so I've learned to leave time for that. It may sound, as I speak, like I'm giving an overview of a lot of topics, so please keep in mind any that you want to ask questions about or raise concerns about.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
The United States Military Industrial Complex has might. General and former President Eisenhower understood this. He warned Americans. Abundant might does not make right; it only advances the notion of righteousness. Patriotism is promoted through militarism. His words fell on deaf ears. The sound was hollow in contrast to the drone of drumbeats. At the time, Americans were as they are today; dedicated to the customs we think characterize democracy.
We see this in many a war and peace policy. Questions are asked of the government and the people. Testimony is taken. Think tanks assess Foreign Policy. Conclusions are drawn and decisions made. Still, in 2010, a few within the electorate wonder as General Eisenhower had.. With Al-Qaida Fading, Why Expand the Afghan War?
We all know the statistics. Over 4,400 American service men and women killed. Over $730 Billion spent. Longer than American involvement in World War II, longer than the Civil War, longer than the American Revolution, catching up to Vietnam.
We all know what a terrible cost the War in Iraq has levied on us. This is a war that my opponent in the Democratic primary, incumbent Stephen Lynch, not only voted for, but also voted to fund at least eleven times.
Still, as frequently as we've heard the dizzying and disheartening statistics, we sometimes lose sight of the direct impact this war has had on our communities. While we spend some $13 billion per month on the Iraq War, many of our cities and towns face crippling budget shortfalls as we climb out of this ongoing recession.
To make it clear to the families of Massachusetts' 9th Congressional district, I have offered a breakdown of the costs, using an interactive map. If you visit the map on my website, you can see what the per capita financial cost to each city and town has been - as well as what that money would have bought in teachers, police, and firefighters over these past seven years.
Iraq certainly isn't the only issue where my opponent and I disagree, or where he has cast a profoundly bad vote. Stephen Lynch voted for the Patriot Act and its reauthorization, while I believe that it represents an infringement on the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans. Lynch voted for the Stupak Amendment to the health care reform bill, while I am staunchly pro-choice and see the Stupak Amendment as the most profound attack on a woman's right to choose since the Hyde Amendment of the 1980's. Stephen Lynch also voted against the health care reform bill, while I support it because it provides tens of millions of Americans with access to health care, allows children to remain on parents' health care plans until the age of twenty-six, and ends some of the worst abuses of health insurance companies, like "pre-existing conditions" restrictions on children.
There is a clear pattern that, while Stephen Lynch may vote with us Democrats more often than not, the votes where Lynch diverges from us Democrats are among the votes that most shape the path on which our country will head. If you no longer want to face the cost of a bad vote - if you want to elect a Better Democrat - I urge you to get involved and support my campaign.
In today's political world, Democrats and Republicans often come with labels preattached. Republicans constitute the "Daddy Party": they are hawkish on foreign affairs and are perceived as stronger with issues such as national security. Democrats, on the other hand, constitute the "Mommy Party." In contrast to Republicans, they are peace-niks; the political beltway labels them as stronger on domestic, "Mommy" issues such as the economy. Interestingly enough, men are more likely to vote Republican, women to vote Democratic.
There was a fascinating period in American politics, however, when this was not the case.
I wrote a review of Karen Malpede's new play "Prophecy" when I had only read but not yet seen it. Karen read the review and invited me to lead the first in a series of talk-back discussions following performances in New York, and I did so on Wednesday. For that incredible privilege I'm glad I wrote that early review, but I'm sorry it was so insufficient as an attempt to convey the intensity of the phenomenon that is "Prophecy."
"Prophecy" should certainly be read (and the book, available in the UK, will soon be published in the US), but it must be seen. This play has, in fact, received the highest praise everywhere it's been presented in this country and the UK, and has nonetheless been refused by the theaters that have praised it.
If a person could approach you on the street, gently caress your cheek, and walk away leaving you with the feeling of having been violently slapped and dowsed with a bucket of ice water, they would approximate Tom Engelhardt's writing, including that in his newest book "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's."
Let me stipulate from the start that at least three-quarters of the book has nothing to do with Obama, but deals purely with Bush's wars. However, those wars -- which always were and still are our wars and our Congress's wars, and the wars of our grandchildren who will pay for them financially and probably in more serious ways -- have not been fundamentally changed by applying the name of a different emperor to them. What Engelhardt has written over the past several years and collected here on the subject of war needed to be said and will continued to need to be said more loudly with each passing day.
Anna Janek is a Republican candidate for Congress from West Bloomfield, Mich. She says: "Socialism, Communism, Welfare-ism, Globalism, Fascism, Obama-ism...it's all the same: State control of the Human Spirit under the guise of benevolence."
Marcy Winograd is a Democratic candidate for Congress from Los Angeles, Calif. She promises to "establish a new federal agency to employ millions of Americans building rapid transit and repairing bridges, ports, water treatment plants and other infrastructure."
Franz Kafka's book "The Trial" begins "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." There follow many thousands of words describing the ordeal of someone denied the right to know the charges against him, to face his accusers, to be given a fair and speedy trial by a jury of his peers, and so forth. We have read thousands of stories of such "Kafkan" experiences since the advent of the Global War of Terror. But we need a different kind of story now.
James Gilligan published a book 13 years ago called "Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic," in which he diagnosed the root cause of violence as deep shame and humiliation, a desperate need for respect and status (and, fundamentally love and care) so intense that only killing (oneself and/or others) could ease the pain -- or, rather, the lack of feeling. When a person becomes so ashamed of his needs (and of being ashamed), Gilligan writes, and when he sees no nonviolent solutions, and when he lacks the ability to feel love or guilt or fear, the result can be violence.
Everyone seems to know that the tea party "movement" had a rally on the steps of the capitol yesterday. They got in the face of a few Congressmen and now every Beltway media outlet from the Washington Post to Meet the Press is talking about it. But there was another protest in town yesterday. Thousands of people showed up in front of the White House to tell Obama (and Congress) to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to treat Palestinians fairly, and to generally end the US military empire.
MSNBC estimates that somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 tea party people showed up at the capitol building. Yet the low end of the estimates for the number of people who showed up at the peace demonstration (including myself) is about 2,500, and the high end is about 10,000. Where's our moment on Meet the Press? Where's our article in the New York Times?
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