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- The 1916 Effect - updated
- The dog that didn’t bark
- Colonization by SARS-CoV-2 NOT SYNONYMOUS WITH INFECTION, (different, disimilar) screening study highlights:
- 2020: A Propaganda Masterpiece | Perspectives on the Pandemic XVII
- Covid Vaccine Effectiveness 2.9% ( Negligible to non existent effectiveness)
- Haiti and Cuba: Drug Running, Windward Passage, Panama - Location, location, location
- "Proof that puts an end to the Sars-CoV-2 Narrative" | Professor Sucharit Bhakdi
- Is That Rush for a Third Covid Vaccine Booster Jab Necessary?
- Russia, Iran, Turkey reject unilateral Syria Sanctions, Oppose Oil Theft & Separatist Ambitions
- Lockdown Lovers Lack Faith In Their Vaccine Saviour? From Fear To Folly
- Canada's Covid Vaccine Weekly Harm and Death Update; More Vaxxed Deaths and More People Who Die w Covid are Vaxxed
- Trudeau's Election Ploy- Identity Politics/Native Issues and Prepping the Arctic for Encircling Russia
- Part 2- Covid and Climate: Tales of Two Hysterias
- Turkey and US Negotiations Continue for Kabul (Hamid Karzai) Airport- Still No Final Agreement
- "Why most people who now die with Covid in England have had a vaccination" The Guardian
American Everyman
Crooks And Liars
Google News 9/11 & False Flag
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Were Planes Really Hijacked by Arab Muslims?
- NFL Coach Apologises For Comments About 9/11 Attacks - Pedestrian.TV
- Cayuga County-area sports schedule for Dec. 9-11 - The Citizen
- Mike Johnson's 9/11 moment: The House speaker comes through for the World Trade Center Health Program - New York Daily News
March 2009
POWER-UNDER: Trauma and Non-Violent Social Change - by Steven Wineman
Tue, 03/31/2009 - 14:54 — McJThis book looks promising. It was recommended by a Canadian blogger I read occasionally. I have only read the excerpts so far. You can read the complete text made available for free by the author here or download a pdf version here.
POWER-UNDER: Trauma and Non-Violent Social Change
by Steven Wineman
"Understanding trauma can help us to overcome divisions that chronically plague progressive social change movements. The left has been repeatedly weakened by internal divisions and fragmentation,[16] both in the form of in-fighting within social change organizations and through the inability of different oppressed constituencies to form robust and sustainable coalitions. There are many reasons for these divisions that have nothing to do with trauma. These range from principled ideological differences to unprincipled power struggles; from the complex ways in which multiple oppressions create divisions in our society to the divide-and-conquer strategies utilized by forces aligned with the status quo in the face of unrest and social change activism.
I believe we could benefit from adding trauma to this list, not as a competing explanation but as one that is typically ignored to the detriment of social change movements. If we can recognize that social change movements and constituencies are made up largely of traumatized people, many of the difficulties we encounter dealing effectively with difference and conflict become much more understandable. Internal conflicts blow up and become unresolvable in part because we lack a common language and framework for recognizing the effects of trauma, and lack practical tools for managing the traumatic rage that we all too readily direct at each other.
When trauma is unnamed and unrecognized, its presence – at once palpable and invisible – can cause an enormous amount of damage. We need to develop shared understandings of the politics of trauma that bring awareness of trauma into the room in the same way that feminism has brought awareness of power relations involving domination into the room. By this I mean an awareness that people may carry the effects of trauma – victimization, subjective powerlessness, traumatic rage, and so on – into any situation: any meeting, any organizing effort, any coalition-building project, any conflict.
It is only through the emergence of consciousness and a common language to describe the politics of powerlessness that we can create possibilities to interrupt and counteract the damaging effects of trauma within our social change organizations and movements."
=======================================================================
SOME EXCERPTS...
http://www.traumaandnonviolence.com/
On Power-Under:
The expression of powerless rage is like the flailing of someone who is literally drowning. The survivor, who is reenacting the moment of trauma, is caught up in a desperate struggle for psychic survival. Someone in such a state cannot possibly gauge the impact of their actions on others. And to someone who is feeling powerless, acted upon, and profoundly victimized, it is typically inconceivable that we could be posing any threat or danger to others. Yet the flailing of a drowning person poses a very real danger to anyone who approaches, and so can the expressed rage of a survivor in a traumatic state. The irony is that someone acting from an internal state of sheer powerlessness can have an enormously powerful impact on anyone in their path. This is the dynamic that I am calling power-under.
On Nonviolence as Self-Protection:
Nonviolent resistance is extraordinarily relevant to the situation of trauma survivors. In most cases the lasting, major damage caused by abuse is not physical but emotional and psychological - the crushing of human spirit. Efforts at self-protection by trauma survivors that demonize or dehumanize the Other unwittingly and tragically compound the damage to our own spirits. A central challenge faced by trauma survivors is how to resist malevolence and violation by valuing rather than diminishing human life.
Nonviolence redefines the terms of self-protection. It poses an entirely new set of questions: How can I safeguard my human spirit? How can I try to defend and protect myself physically without compromising or crushing my own humanity? How can I resist acts of abuse and oppression without dehumanizing my oppressors? Or anyone else? How can I maintain human connectedness in the face of overwhelming malevolence? How can I take in and let myself feel the pain of what has been done to me rather than evading or numbing that pain through an act of violence? How can I take in the almost intolerably complex truth that I have been abused, demeaned and disregarded by valuable human beings?
On Power-Under in the Aftermath of 9/11:
The sense of victimization and subjective powerlessness that so many Americans understandably feel in the wake of September 11 stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming dominance that the U.S. actually wields globally in the economic, political and military spheres. The aftermath of September 11 offers an illustration of the lethal pairing of subjective powerlessness and objective dominance, in this case played out on the stage of world politics. The sense of being acted upon, and the levels of terror and rage that it evokes, simply drown out the relevance or significance of American dominance for many people. In turn, the intolerable sense of subjective powerlessness that underlies traumatic terror and rage creates an exceedingly fertile base for popular support of counter-aggression that can be defined as self-protection and self-defense.
The more we are able to speak to people's experience of vulnerability and powerless rage in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks - not instead of, but in addition to a critique of American dominance in the world - the better our chances of reaching people and persuading them of the wisdom of peaceful responses to terrorism.
On Breaking Cycles of Violence:
We all have an understandable tendency to be incisively aware of our own victimization and to deny our own capacities to cause harm. As a result, we tend to describe neat divisions between victims and perpetrators, between oppressors and the oppressed. But we do so at the expense of an accurate description of political and personal realities; and our perceptions of ourselves as pure victims, and of oppressors as inhuman Others, can set the stage for continued cycles of violence. Conversely, if we can take hold of more complex versions of reality, in which we are willing to describe ourselves and others as both victims and perpetrators, both oppressed and oppressors, it can be a path toward the kind of awareness and compassion that we need to break cycles of violence.
On Humanizing the Oppressor:
If we insist on the human status of the oppressor, it means that we can no longer view him or her as "the Other" - as an object or figure with whom there is no possibility for human connection. This fundamentally changes what is possible in how we approach and behave toward "the oppressor," who is now a person. It constrains tendencies toward violence and counter-abuse; it points toward strategies for struggle and non-cooperation which maintain full respect for our adversaries; and it also opens us to recognizing our own capacities to act as oppressors.
Dehumanizing the oppressor forces us to deny the oppressor within, to insist that "I could never possibly be like Them," and thus prevents us from undertaking the kinds of personal transformations that are indispensable steps on the path to liberation. When we humanize the oppressor, it enables us not only to recognize the oppressor within us, but also to maintain compassion for ourselves as we struggle to contain and transform our own destructive capacities and potentials.
On Men as Perpetrators and Victims:
Understanding the ways in which men are victims can deepen and amplify our understanding of the ways in which men act as perpetrators. "Victim" and "perpetrator" do not represent separate and unconnected pieces of male experience: the socialization to dominance requires the crushing of men's emotional capacities; and the experience of powerlessness and trauma, together with societal values and structures which place men in dominant positions, has a direct bearing on male violence, brutality, and predatory behavior.
In order to view men through the single dimension of power-over, we have to find a way to factor out the truth that all men were once children, that as children they were helpless and vulnerable and acted upon, that some were sexually abused and nearly all were physically abused, that their capacities for empathy and human connection were systematically uprooted, that they were ridiculed and shamed for any display of vulnerability and any non-aggressive emotional expression. If men begin to become conscious of the ways that sexism has traumatized and oppressed us, and if we start to seriously believe that we benefit from the expression of a full range of emotions and from the capacity for empathy and for emotional connection, we could begin to dismantle some of the lynch pins of male domination.
On Trauma and Right Wing Populism:
Trauma has something to tell us about the appeal of right-wing populism in U.S. politics. People's sense of victimization is commonly played out politically through the mobilization of fear, hatred, and scapegoating of targeted groups (or institutions or nations) who in various ways are identified as threats to their well-being and as sources of their victimization. The major actors on the right surely understand the vulnerability of traumatized people to populist appeals for mass scapegoating - though undoubtedly they would not describe their politics in these terms. The manipulation of traumatic victimization into political expressions of rage and hatred downward at stigmatized and relatively powerless targets - rather than upward at power elites and at structures of domination and oppression - is one of the lynch pins that sustains the status quo.
Any strategy for countering right-wing populism needs to take into account the breadth and depth of traumatic experience in our society. The challenge for the left is to develop a populist politics which can resonate with people's experiences of victimization and trauma, but can do so in ways that direct rage upward at the real forces that make people powerless and devalued, and which offer people options for the constructive expression of their rage.
On Trauma and Social Change:
Examining psychological trauma contributes to the capacities of movements opposing oppression to achieve lasting social change. It is only by unmasking trauma as a major factor affecting social change efforts that we can develop the tools we need to address it on anything like a consistent basis. The first step, both simple and incredibly daunting, is to name the issue. This means identifying the connections between every kind of oppression and the traumatization of individuals on a mass scale. It means a willingness to recognize trauma in the lives of those we identify as oppressors. It requires the same kind of willingness to examine trauma in our own lives, in whatever configurations "we" are set off against "them." It means recognizing traumatic rage as a force of enormous political magnitude, and the posing of myriad strategic questions about the mobilization of that force.
Updated Jan. 2008
George Galloway labeled a terrorist supporter and banned from entering Canada for giving humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza
Mon, 03/30/2009 - 01:06 — McJ
The outspoken peace activist and five term British MP, George Galloway, is scheduled to give a series of speeches titled "Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar" in four Canadian cities this week. Earlier this month Mr. Galloway led the 99-vehicle 'Viva Palestina' convoy bringing a generator, medicine, food, clothing and toys from the UK into the Gaza strip after an historic 24-day journey through Europe and Africa. 300 people made the 5000 mile journey in a convoy that stretched for 3 miles.
. 
This incredible, humanitarian accomplishment, that went unremarked in the main stream press, was
a moment cherished by the Palestinians in Gaza. In a letter of thank you to George Galloway, Dalal Alhusseini Muhtadi writes:
"I welcome you as a Palestinian brother of mine...I think Mother Palestine is weeping today with joy not sadness, for having such a son, a hero, that along the many, many long years of suffering, refused to forget.... Refused to forget the horrifying suffering, the tremendous pain, the inhumane genocide...Her rape and torture in every way possible...And he kept on going and going...Until justice and defeat of the siege prevailed. Sir, this is not just a victory for Mother Palestine....but rather a victory for all of humanity indeed.
Upon entering Gaza, Mr. Galloway handed over the vehicles and supplies to the Hamas authorities.
Last week, after receiving letters from the Jewish Defense League (JDL) and B'nai Brith urging the Canadian government to do "everything possible to keep this hater away", the Canadian Border Services Agency informed Mr. Galloway he was considered a threat to the national security of Canada and would not be allowed to enter the country. The story is rather confusing (mostly because the officials involved keep changing their stories and passing the buck) but initially we learned it was because of his views on the Afghanistan war. Now, we're told it is because under Canada's anti-terrorism laws he is considered to have "financially supported" a terrorist group when he delivered humanitarian aid to Gaza's Hamas government.
Jason Kenney, Canada's Minister of Immigration and Multiculturism, has been under fire all week for the decision as Canadians rallied in protest. In a bizarre statement, Kenney's spokesman Alykhan Velshi, told Britain's Channel Four news that Galloway was an "infandous street-corner Cromwell" that would not be allowed into Canada to "pee on our carpet". (Watch here.)
George Galloway fired back with a statement of his own saying a "quick trawl" established that Kenney is "a gay-baiter, gung-ho armchair warrior, with an odd habit of exceeding his immigration brief" who "three years ago...attacked the pro-Western prime minister of Lebanon Fuad Saniora for being ungrateful to Canada for its support of Israeli bombardment of his country." And further said,
"being banned by such a man is like being told to sit up straight by the hunchback of Notre Dame or being lectured on due diligence by Lord Conrad Black – a Kenney ally, now breaking stones in the hot sun. On another, and personal, note for a Scotsman to be excluded from Canada is like being turned away from the family home."
March 20th in a Channel 4 News interview, Meir Weinstein (of the JDL) took credit for having had George Galloway banned from Canada. Galloway, who has legally challenged the Canadian Government's ruling, vowed to speak to Canadians by other means if he is not allowed to enter Canada. Weinstein threatened that "we will see to it that the Canadian government will be monitoring every individual and organization that will have anything to do with it” and that he and the JDL "will be looking into these organizations that invited him… their links to terror groups as well” and that he will “see to it that the Canadian Government will be monitoring every individual and organization that has anything to do with George Galloway”.
Galloway's lawyers were in court today to have the ruling overturned. The court room was packed for the hearing and there was a demonstration outside the court house. The judge will make a decision on the case before 2 pm tomorrow. Regardless of the outcome, a large convoy of lawyers, MP's and antiwar activists will be meeting Mr. Galloway at the US/Canada border on Tuesday.
Galloway is currently on his US leg of the speaking tour, having no problem getting into the US because he is not considered a terrorist supporter there. Unlike Galloway, the JDL has been called by the FBI "a violent extremist Jewish organization in their report "Terrorism 2000/2001" and whose activities have since been described in congressional testimony by FBI agents as terrorist".
===============================================================================
George Galloway will be on "The Hour" with George Stroumboulopoulos, Canada's award-winning late-night TV talk show, on Monday, March 30. If you're in Canada, tune in on CBC at 11 pm. If not, catch the interview after it airs at http://www.cbc.ca/thehour. (I'll embed the video here if I can.)
Projection of West Bank Permanent Status, Camp David July 2000
Thu, 03/26/2009 - 12:08 — McJ
Map taken from - "From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?" P. 46
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fww...
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
Thu, 03/26/2009 - 12:06 — McJPerry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
Golan Heights and West Lebanon
Thu, 03/26/2009 - 12:04 — McJGOLAN HEIGHTS
http://www.theisraelproject.org/atf/Account16894/images/_271105212552084...
SOUTH LEBANON
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Shebaa_Farms.jpg
"I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v
PNAC's Plan For Pakistan
Thu, 03/26/2009 - 11:52 — McJPNAC's Plan For Pakistan (blocking Chinese access to the Persian Gulf Energy)
Click here for larger map.
Oil and Gas Infrastructure in the Caspian Sea Region
Thu, 03/26/2009 - 11:34 — McJOil and Gas Infrastructure in the Caspian Sea Region
Click here for larger map.
Screenshot of portion of BTC Line (Baku to Ceyhan)
Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War - by Pepe Escobar
Wed, 03/25/2009 - 23:09 — McJGlobalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War
by Pepe Escobar
"He is one of the most interesting - and as far I can tell, informed - journalists writing about the Middle East. He travels there, and seems to speak and read several of the languages; Escobar thinks that much of what passes for the war on terror is a war for energy. I think he is right about this."
John Judis of the New Republic
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike
Note: For ease of reading, you can view this in full screen just click the screen icon in the upper right hand corner.
Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War
Liquid war: Welcome to Pipelineistan - By Pepe Escobar
Wed, 03/25/2009 - 18:36 — McJ Asia Times Online
Liquid war: Welcome to Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KC26Ag01.html
Mar 26, 2009
What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.
Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.
All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)
I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own do-it-yourself routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.
In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow - which digitally details every single pipeline in Eurasia - or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement for me.
Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.
Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that "war on terror", whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.
Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?
Calling Dr Zbig In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski - realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the US on its modern energy wars - laid out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy". Later, his master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).
For Dr Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia - from, that is, thinking big - it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system".
By now, Dr Zbig - among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama - must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.
Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan - and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington - will have the upper hand in whatever is to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a "long war", that can change that.
Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development of energy alternatives". Though you may not have noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.
In these early skirmishes of the 21st century, China reacted swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, its leaders were formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be around for a while.
Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union - Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan - which the Bill Clinton administration and then the new George W Bush administration, run by those former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.
Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves - and thus sell much more to the West than US-imposed sanctions now allow.
No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as former vice president Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neo-conservative chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a US attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming to represent.
Global BRIC-a-brac
Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang province, its Far West.
The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.
Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations - Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist - and, because of that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway global strategists like Dr Zbig and president George H W Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the 21st century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries - for those of you by now collecting New Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China - plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Add in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high-octane dream.
The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.
Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to the Chinese border.
No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would determine Liquid war: Welcome to Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar
much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of US military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).
AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity registered in the US, is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the Trans-Balkan", slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a US-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by president Bill Clinton's energy secretary Bill
Richardson and later by Cheney.
Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (from thence onto Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.
As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest overseas base the US had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo.
Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the neo-con-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").
How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan?
Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's "global war on terror". Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable - but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another time.
Rainy night in Georgia
If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability - in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of the energy flow.
It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant", less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.
Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.
From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing - and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.
For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the US version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.
Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.
Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC - its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe - means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.
In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.
In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC - once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil - lives or dies.
Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those US bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.
And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the most important question on the planet.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times Online and an analyst for the Real News. This article draws from his new book, Obama does Globalistan. He is also the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. Pepe may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009 Pepe Escobar.)
"We Won't Chill Till We Confirm The Kill" [3]: It's Not Just A Slogan On A T-Shirt
Wed, 03/25/2009 - 04:20 — jamesFrom "Lawrence of Cyberia" on "the most moral army in the world".
Cowards.
Permalinks-
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/we-wont-chill-till-we-co...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/the-smaller-they-are-the...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/youve-got-to-run-fast-ru...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/if-you-believe-it-can-be...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/better-use-durex-2-its-n...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/the-smaller-they-are-the...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/let-every-arab-mother-kn...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/one-shot-two-kills-its-n...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/if-you-believe-it-can-be...
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/03/the-smaller-they-are-the...
You might feel a little sick by the time you get to the bottom of these. BTW, did anyone else notice how the attack on the cricketers and a few other terror attacks around the world shifted Gaza and the Israeli boycott off the front pages? Stroke of luck for the Israelis, what?
Big Surprise: Human Rights Watch Says UK And Pakistani Agents Colluded In Torture
Fri, 03/20/2009 - 08:36 — WinterA shocking new report alleges widespread complicity between British security agents and their Pakistani counterparts who have routinely engaged in the torture of suspects, a report in the Observer has revealed.
You can read the whole post here and/or comment below.
The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
Fri, 03/20/2009 - 01:04 — McJThe Age of Reason
by Thomas Paine
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Thomas Paine
US patriot & political philosopher (1737 - 1809)
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1794 - Thomas Paine - The Age of Reason
Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work History philosophy conspiracyScrewed Again: Seymour Hersh Puts Pro-War Spin On What We Would Normally Call Acts Of Terrorism
Wed, 03/18/2009 - 11:52 — WinterFamed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh ruffled a few feathers last week with comments in Minnesota regarding an alleged "executive assassination ring" -- a squad of elite killers who have allegedly been infiltrating foreign countries and murdering ... well, officially, nobody knows who their victims have been, really, but if this story were officially acknowledged (whatever that means these days), we would no doubt be told that the alleged victims of the alleged murders were "the worst of the worst", without whom America will now be safer, huzzah huzzah.
You can read the rest here, and/or comment below.
On Liberty- John Stuart Mill
Wed, 03/18/2009 - 02:33 — McJ"No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study, and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think."
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)
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Sneaking Back In ... Again!
Tue, 03/17/2009 - 20:38 — WinterI've resumed blogging. Huzzah! I hope to have more for you soon. In the meantime, thanks to James for all the good recent work, and to others as well for keeping this site so interesting in my absence. You can read my most recent post here, and/or comment below. And I will rejoin you as soon as I can.
Warring World(s) Part 5b. On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont.)
Tue, 03/17/2009 - 08:08 — jamesPart 5b On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont) (Previous part here)
The following is written in a rather didactic manner. An inevitable result, I think, of trying to pack a lot into a short essay and also trying to cater for a wide spectrum of experience and understanding amongst those that might read it. So, much of it will be redundant to many. There are a lot of opinions in these essays for which I don't give references. They come from my own experiences, some of which have been extreme. So take it as you will.
In the last Part (5a), I talked about beginning to oppose the conditioning in your life which has literally restricted you and your potential as a human being. The conditioning is all pervasive and like fish who cannot perceive the water they swim in because they have no experience of the water never being there, we cannot understand a life without this conditioning. We may imperfectly imagine it but that's all it will be unless we start making it a reality. We need faith to do this. Faith is believing in what you know to be true or can be true when it doesn't feel like it or you haven't experienced it yet, (these things unseen). And there will be times when it will feel impossible. But as many survivors of abuse, torture and addiction can tell you, it can be done. Programming can be overcome and meaningful and profound change can be brought about. You can change who you are. This is what free will is about; to allow you to become who you want to be, a free woman or man or alternatively a mental and financial slave. This is why the psychopaths spend so much time and effort undermining your sense of free will and personal authority.
To dominate you, they need to dominate your mind because they physically cannot guard and coerce you 24/7. They can only dominate your mind if you co-operate in doing that. Don't co-operate! Don't accept it!
To become a free person and to inspire others to do the same, you need character and nothing builds character like living in and pursuing the truth. And nothing destroys it so effectively as lying and acquiescing to lies. You make yourself so vulnerable psychologically to being manipulated by others when you engage in deceit. You can only blackmail someone who has been deceitful one way or another. That person, then, no longer has control over their own life. Somebody else has that control. This is the fate of so many of our politicians. They have done deals in the dark to gain power but they are no longer their own master. So what is the point? You can't do deals with the Devil and expect to win. So if you are going to run up against “the system”, you are going to need character to resist the fear and to guard against being blackmailed and manipulated one way or another. You will need a solid psychological, even spiritual, foundation and that is provided by pursuing truth in a committed manner.
We need to reduce the fear in our daily lives and increase (or take back) control before we can become part of that formidable foe of the system. This means shrinking back our lives until they are under our control and then after that advancing out into the community and engaging the system.
I am going to harp on the TeeVee again! I urge you again to remove it from your life. It is a major source of fear and helplessess. It also reinforces past deep conditioning. Research psychologists have found that survivors of torture and brainwashing still think their thoughts and concepts are their own even after they have come to accept they have been intensively brainwashed. I could talk on the reasons but the important point for us is that if you have been brainwashed by the TV, you won't realise it. But if you can get an adequate break from it, you will see it. Like a fish that spends enough time out of the water to appreciate the difference, it can now understand what the water feels like when it returns to it. Personally, I find it deeply offensive to be constantly lied to and manipulated. That's Tee Vee. And that's enough from me on TeeVee!
Shrinking your life down means seeing less people. That being the case, it makes sense to leave the shitty ones out; the contentious ones, the draining ones even if they are family. Actually, especially if they are family because they likely have a major negative influence on you because they have been around probably since childhood when the deepest conditioning went in. Don't argue with them, just be hard to reach.
If you are on a lot of committees, take a sabbatical from them. Later on after you have more control over your life you can choose which ones to pick up again. Get your finances under control. Debt is a form of slavery. Reduce your debt in any way you can. If the monetary system collapses, the less debt you have the better off you will be. Thanks to the US government's “Bail-Out”, there are now a lot of cashed up predators out there looking for (and creating) bargains, cheap assets. They intend to create a lot of hardship so as to profit from it. You don't want to have liens and mortgages hanging over you if you can help it. The ownership of your particular lending institution may pass into the hands of some real vultures looking for a short term profit which usually means cashing up the assets and that may have implications for your mortgage (if you have one, of course). At least do everything you can to minimise your debt and exposure. No sense in making it easy for them. Perhaps you could imagine you will lose your job in a month's time and start doing things from that perspective.
Buy yourself a copy of “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin. It has a very practical and complete program to follow to get control over your finances and the philosophy is in complete accord with where we want to go with all this. (Well, at least, where I want to go with this!). To become active in the community to bring about change, you will need time and energy which will likely reduce your work time and income and so you will have to reduce your need for money. Joe Dominguez retired as a less than highly paid analyst on Wall Street at the age of thirty one. He devoted the remaining thirty years of his life to working for free for community groups and charities. The book tells you how you can do the same.
Look for other ways to shrink or simplify your life because the easier it is to maintain, the more time and mental space you will have. Most importantly, you will get to feel what it is like being in charge of your own life instead of being at someone else's beck and call, be it your dominating mother, your bank manager, your boss or the local loan-shark (not in any particular order, you understand!). You will get to feel what it is like to have time to yourself. Be mindful of who and what you tolerate in your home. Aim to turn it into a sanctuary. We are designed to have stress in our lives. We need it to to keep us sharp. But we are not designed for continual stress. Unremitting stress leads to heart attacks and their psychological equivalents, burn-outs and breakdowns. This society tries to keep you so busy and puts you on 'hurry-up' so that you don't have time to think. Without peace and time to think in your life you can't see what is happening to you. Make that time; get that peace. . . . . and plan your next move. Following are some suggestions.
After shrinking down to get control and a better perspective, it's now time to expand out. Get to know your neighbours. Invite them for dinner. Listen to them and find out their concerns. Talk politics; talk about the future and the future of your children. Look for ways to help each other. Look for ways to trade in a non-monetary way. Build community groups such as food co-ops to grow vegies and buy in bulk. Not only will this be enjoyable, it will save you money and will reinforce the benefits of co-operation over competition and community over isolation.
I have a quote for you from “Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn and a question to follow it – (I borrowed it from the front page of this website)
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
The question is, “Would these people have been so easy to pick off if they had been living in an interdependent, supportive way with their neighbours?” There's a lesson here for us today.
Start to improve you neighbourhood with community projects. Lobby the Municipal authorities or Councils for changes. Pick projects or issues to start with that you can easily win because not only will you be standing up against the Council and perhaps (probably) some vested interests, you will be standing up against your's and your friends' conditioned learned helplessness. You want to start out kicking a couple of goals to learn in an experiential way that you can win.
Liaise with other community groups to find common concerns. Nominate and support you own candidates for upcoming municipal elections. (They must have no political party affiliations or be prepared to sever them before accepting the nomination). Get behind this candidate with everything you and your fellow community members have. Repeat this process until you have taken control of the Local Council (or whatever you call it in your area). You are now in a position to root out corruption and the inevitable and equally damaging incompetence that goes with it. The resultant prosperity and energy will snowball.
When State elections are imminent, propose to the community groups and local councilors that one of the councilors be nominated to run for the State Government; that you all work for his or her election on the proviso that they vote in the legislature according to the majority vote of the council. In other word, the State member becomes the agent of the council which is, in turn, the agent of the community groups. Again, no political party affiliations are permitted (you don't want any chance of split loyalty) and the electee agrees to only one term of office before it is rotated to another councillor. You want to minimise the possibilities for corruption, and besides, dealing with scumbags becomes debilitating!
You can expect someone elected in this nature to be frozen out in terms of influence for a time by the State Government which may even attempt to penalise your municipality (much like penalising the Gazans for electing Hamas but in a much more minor way , hopefully!), but hang in there. Eventually they will have to deal with your representative and by the time they do you will have a lot of credibility. Groups from other municipalities, I would expect, will approach you once you are seen to be successful and prospering. The good people, the ordinary citizens (like you and me) greatly outnumber the corrupt and the psychopaths. I think people are just waiting for a mechanism or method to turn dreams into reality.
Political parties have shanghaied democracy. You elect a representative who then doesn't listen to you and the reason why is simple. He owes his political future to the party because without the party endorsement he is dead (politically). This happens in both parties, of course, and because the vast majority of incumbents are re-elected, why should he pay any attention at all to the voters' wishes? There is a way to get their attention, though. At the next Federal election, see if you can't organise your area to vote against the incumbent which ever party he may belong to. The two parties are just two faces of the same coin which is readily apparent to all, now, anyway. So what's it matter to anyone which party “represents” you? Not much.
You can't change the parties but you most certainly can change the faces of the representatives. A majority of incumbents hold their seats with only a few percent or less of the vote. You can swing this and remove the incumbent; you know, that snake that voted for the Patriot Act; that snake that voted for the Bail-Out. Go join the challenger's campaign whether that be Republican or Democrat (or whatever Tweedledum and Tweedledee are called in your country). Take your friends with you and tell them, “We're from the community and we're here to help you!” If they wont let you into their camp, campaign for them anyway! Make a massive impact on the snakes that have voted against your interests; that have sold you and the next generation down the river of debt. If the PTB want to make a fuss about this strategy, that's all to the good because the publicity will focus attention on the glaring fact that both parties are the enemy and not this one or that one and the idea of voting out the incumbent whoever he may be will spread. The aim of the strategy is not to get someone elected but to get someone UNELECTED. If this strategy is repeated and spread widely, then either you will get some decent representation or you will grind the system to a halt. Either way you will go a long way towards bringing the cosy two-party system down and making them paranoid about their volunteers! Sound like a plan?
Back to the local community level, start a LETS scheme. LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading Systems. If you are not familiar with what they are, you can read about them here. The ideas of LETS schemes are great and have great potential. Many, though, make the mistake of trading in a currency unit other than dollars (or whatever the national currency in their particular country is). It is much much better to have what is known as “equivalence”. The dollars of the LETS scheme equals exactly the dollar of the national currency. They are for all intents and purposes the same. It's no more that a system of IOUs then. If you use dollars and can settle up in dollars should someone wish to leave the scheme, then you will be acting exactly like a bank, creating money (and out of the same thin air that they use!), only the community will gain the benefit and there is not much the government can do about it. After all, all you are doing is extending credit to each other to be settled up at some future date. The process is no different from the corner store having customer accounts except that in the LETS scheme you will exchange that debt for goods from someone else. If the government wants to say you are acting like a bank then they have to admit what banking really is. If you are guilty of fraud, counterfeiting or acting illegally, then so are the banks.
Start out by issuing everyone with a book of blank IOU's. In other words, a cheque book. Each LETS member has an overdraft limit which can be increased over time as they demonstrate an ability to trade and thereby discharge their debts. Make this trading subject to tax. Don't try and avoid it. It's the second common mistake with many LETS schemes. Keep it legal and open. Mind you, it would be wise to keep all records and computer programs duplicated two or three times at different locations in case of a raid and seizure. You want to keep it going.
A LETS scheme could be really kicked into high gear should you and your community take charge of the local council. The council can then run it and can also guarantee the credit balances because it has a guaranteed income in the form of rates. It can accept payments through the LETS scheme for rates and in doing so giving the LETS units (dollars on credit) guaranteed value. It can avail itself of some cost free financing by paying for some services through its own LETS account. Municipal workers could be paid partly through their LETS accounts. LETS money stays in the community and so keeps going round and round rather than being flushed out every time it is spent with a corporation.
The difference between prosperity and deprivation in a community is governed by the amount of currency in circulation to pay for the goods and services being produced in the community. It is no more complicated than that. A well run LETS scheme will effectively increase that amount of currency and consequently lead to increased prosperity and well being in the community. During the Great Depression in the Thirties, the currency level (Money Supply) was deliberately reduced to one third of its 1929 level. That's what caused the deprivation. The bankers are in the process of doing it again. A LETS scheme will work directly against the banks
One of the major benefits to the psychopaths that run our societies from this economic shrinking going on is that it creates mass unemployment amongst our youth. They are then much more susceptible to being recruited into the armed services and being fed headfirst into the war machine. If you want to stop this war machine then one very effective strategy is to choke off the supply of recruits. Or if you simply don't want your children being sucked into this machine, then you are going to have to create alternative employment for them. With your now vibrant community groups, you can look to starting businesses that will employ these young people in activities that will be beneficial to all. Perhaps you could provide scholarships to students to train in skills needed in your community. A LETS scheme can help in all this, too. You could also target workers currently employed in war industries in your area.
You may think that the government will impose a draft if it can't get the soldiers it wants through economic conscription. But I doubt it very much. That system broke down disastrously in the Vietnam war era and would do so again for the same reason. The conscripts did not decide of their own free will to go to war and they were acutely aware of that. An economic conscript will more readily believe he chose freely (even though that's not the case) and so will much more likely do what he is told. Big difference.
One final suggestion is that if you are going to engage in protests or demonstrations, wear your sunglasses and perhaps a hat and take your video camera with you. Encourage others to do the same. Film the cops and anybody you suspect of being an agent provocateur. In fact, get in the habit of carrying your camera with you in the car wherever you go. I personally think demos are far less productive that other strategies. They sometimes produce injuries and often waste time subsequently with court appearances and perhaps even jail. I think it is much better spending your finite amount of time and energy in throwing the bastards out or simply going around them rather than complaining to them about their own behaviour. All appealing to Caesar about Caesar does is tell both Caesar and you that you think he has the power and you don't. You've got the power. Use it!
It has taken the psychopaths generations to maneuver us into this sorry state so it will take time, years, to turn it all around. But the sooner it starts, the sooner it will happen and maybe the easier it will be. In the meantime, you will be improving your lot and the lot of others, regardless.
Warring World(s) Part 5a. On Becoming a Formidable Foe
Sat, 03/14/2009 - 22:53 — jamesPrevious Part 4b here
On Becoming a Formidable Foe
There's a war going on and it's been going on ever since so-called “civilisation” i.e. specialised and hierarchical society, began. It's a psychological war and it's being waged constantly against we the “common people” by those who would dominate us in order that we serve them.
I have called those that would dominate us “psychopaths”. While I have resisted defining them for a number of reasons preferring, instead, to simply describe them, I will say this, again; that these people exist is beyond question and that a “psychopath” is someone who has effectively no conscience. Consequently, they feel no shame, no remorse and no guilt at exploiting others. They have nothing inside them mentally to which we can appeal to in an effort to have them change their ways, to co-operate with the rest of humanity. (Further description is to be found here.) This makes negotiation with them effectively impossible and worse than a waste of time (See this article and comments from the Forum on Camp David for an example), given that while ever they have an opportunity to exploit others, they will. So the focus should be on taking away that opportunity. Ultimately, that means physically containing them; isolating them from the rest of the community in as humanitarian a way as possible. After all, we don't want to emulate their behaviour in our efforts to stop this very same behaviour. This is one of the follies of employing violence and retribution in fighting them. In the end, of course, we wish to identify and remove the causes for this anti-social condition. However, before we can change the causative circumstances, we have the more immediate problem of how to wrest control of ourselves and our society out of their hands.
There are many among us who function in a way that may be seen as psychopathic but who are not in fact psychopaths but are simply unthinking or opportunists and people of weak character who enjoy power but ultimately just “go with the flow”, “change with the wind” and “do what they're told”. For the purposes of these essays, I will call them “enablers”. Though we are all enablers to some extent, I will generally mean those that follow orders and who either never think there is anything wrong with doing so or will not look at it for fear of losing their position in life and whatever that entails. These people believe in “authority”. But these people can be appealed to to change. It is best done through example. These people can change and they will because they “change with the wind”. The “wind” being our collective example. When a critical mass of revolutionaries is reached it suddenly overwhelms the old order. The reason is that these enablers “flop over”, as it were. I need to talk more at length about the intoxication of power and the making of psychopaths and will do so in a subsequent essay.
On the other hand, the psychopaths, as said before, cannot be changed by us or by themselves. Picking the difference between these two groups is difficult. Fortunately for us, we don't need to differentiate in terms of strategy or tactics to use against both groups. At least, not until we as a society are in a position to permanently isolate them as individuals. We have this tragedy in our midst, lets us use the urgent need to repair it to better ourselves and succeeding generations rather than making it worse. The end, dignity, freedom and respect for all (who would likewise respect others), has to be the means as well. Where to start? We start by undoing the conditioning that has filled us with fear. We treat it as a phobia against disobedience and as a mental agoraphobia, a fear of stepping outside our now self imposed mental prison. We do this by mentally challenging the erroneous thoughts that govern our behaviour and then we start to physically challenging these same erroneous thoughts through acting differently. Pretty soon the power evaporates out of the conditioning, we see the lie behind it and we are free! Well, freer at least. It's a process.
Violence and the threat of violence are the methods, or weapons of choice of our would be dominators. Alice Miller has detailed the way we are parented, which she calls “poisonous pedagogy” using violence and the threats of violence together with messages of unacceptability. The effect of this process is to leave us all with a very stunted sense of our own autonomy. In other words, our sense of our own freewill which lies at the heart of our creativity and our “image in the likeness of God”. This loss of our ability to understand and use the full extent of our freewill stunts our ability to perceive and experience life; in short, it stunts our nature as human beings, our humanness. This same method of inculcating “desirable” behaviour and thinking is repeated by our society's institutions. We fall victim to these messages because we have been programmed to throughout our childhood. We are like battery hens who maintain their own cages through the mental constructs placed there by others and by believing the story that they were created thus, it has always been this way and this is their destiny. If we are to change our society and its destructive behaviour and goals, we will have to first undo this crippling conditioning. We can do this in our everyday life, and starting today.
We have seen that the 5% or so of our population that are psychopaths have had inordinate influence over the rest of us simply because we have been largely unaware of their existence. If we have been aware of them, we have been blind to their methods and ironically, to their methods of blinding us. We have been lied to from birth by our culture. This has effectively brainwashed us into seeing ourselves and our society upside down; into seeing reality as the controllers in our society would have us see it i.e. that they are in control and we are helpless; that they know what's best for us and we do not. Without this faulty worldview in place in all of us, the psychopaths would be helpless. This psychopathic culture can only function through our co-operation and we outnumber them 20 to 1! We don't need violence and violent weapons. We simply need to change our thinking and subsequent behaviour. The answer is simple, the doing of it less so because the transition process can be a little uncomfortable for everybody! It calls for courage and persistence.
On the way to achieving a critical mass in our society, there will be hardship but there will also be rewards along the way. You will inevitably grow into a more alive and more formidable person. We have a tendency as human beings to want different outputs without changing the inputs. We want a better life without having to make changes in this same life. This is magical thinking. It can't be done. To improve our lives, we have to change and to do that we have to commit to it. We have to “get real” and seek the truth, reality. Change is coming, anyway, so why not take control of what you can, now?
Societal change must start within you as an individual. Without this change you will not be able to contribute to the change in others. So if you look to others first, you will just be a follower and that is not going to advance yourself and it is not going to help advance others. Besides if you have been following the wrong people up till now, how are you going to discern the right ones without changing your worldview first? You would still be looking for essentially the same sort of leader. This is what elections in “two-party states” are all about. Still looking for someone to obey and that is what has led us to this sorry impasse. The “right sort of leader” is one you want to emulate not one you have to, or even want to, obey.
Once you start to change you will be attracted to people who are attempting to do likewise. It now becomes a “chicken and egg thing”, encouraging each other and following each other's example. When this spreads far enough, or goes viral as they say, we have societal change. So the changes I propose are divided into individual and community for clarity of presentation but, as I said, once started on an individual level, it will become a dynamic interaction.
First the individual. This is you, dear reader! The initial focus will be on all the bullshit in your life and getting rid of it (pardon the bluntness. I include myself in all this, BTW). We have been taught bullshit and we repeat it to ourselves every day. Replacing it with truth will simplify your life with yourself and with others. It will reduce the stress and conflict and lead to more happiness. It has to because you will be seeing reality more clearly and will be able to make much better choices. If the reality is that you are afraid of your own shadow, don't bullshit yourself about it. Admit it. Now you can do something about it. The first thing you need to do to fix a broken leg is to face the fact that it is broken. Nothing is going to get better until this first step is taken. Reality cannot be in conflict with itself as there can only be one reality. But you can be in conflict with it and if you are you will pay for it. Alice Miller in her book, "The Body Never Lies", goes to great lengths to show how not facing the reality of our childhood, for instance, will hobble us throughout life and cause ill health and even early death. Nothing can change until we face the truth, whatever that may be. Through truth we undo lies and through undoing lies we gain freedom; freedom from the mental shackles put there by those that would oppress us.
Through knowing truth, you make better choices that will help you rather than some controller that you have been pleasing. That's not to say there won't be some friction with those you work with or live with and love (especially if you live with a controller). It's a sad thing to watch, as an addict is going through the process of fighting his addiction, those around him become threatened and start undermining his efforts. Few welcome change. Forewarned is forearmed!
Buckling under to someone because you love them is not helping you, or them either. Someone is manipulating your immediate controller (they always are, it's part of the territory) and so is manipulating you in turn. By pushing back at who ever it is you love and who is doing this to you, you stop them from relieving their pressure by passing on the bullshit to you and so put pressure on them to pass it back to where it came from. That is helping someone you love.
The first thing to do now is to stop watching TeeVee. It really is demeaning. You are being treated as an idiot and all the psychological messages that go along with that. Not only that, but it reinforces all the programming you received as a child; all the notions this destructive society runs on: competition (one winner, lotsa losers); righteous violence (an oxymoron if ever there was one); authority's right to dominate and wealth equals wisdom (but don't get me started!). The moving light show induces a state of dissociation and thus allows free passage to all sorts of messages, overt and covert. It's brainwashing, pure and simple, and there is no point in fighting your past conditioning if you are also routinely reinforcing it. It's like fighting alcoholism and taking a break every now and then to refresh with a double bourbon. Nuts! So throw that damned box out. If you can't throw it on the municipal garbage tip, stuff it in the garage. If the family politics wont allow that, at least negotiate for it to be put in a room at the end of the house and away from the hub where it dominates thinking and behaviour and you can avoid it. This may seem extreme but if you can live without TV completely for a month and then sit down for a night to watch it you will see why I'm adamant.
We'll come back to the TeeVee later. But, in the meantime, start the experiment. Same goes for newspapers. Save yourself the money. I don't listen to radio either but there's not much of a selection where I live and besides I have issues with it that are peculiar to me. Be discerning. Certainly don't listen to talkback or the news. It's best if you can do without it altogether for a month (rather than having to turn it on and off all the time) just to give yourself a point of comparison. Tape some music and listen to that instead and get your news from the internet.
Next, we all talk bullshit to ourselves and to others. Start challenging obvious bullshit from others. There's no need to get aggressive or moralistic about it. Be respectful because that's what we want more of in the world. Plus, you might have made a mistake in your assessment. Lead by example. Just ask people to explain themselves further. “I don't understand. How does that work?” for instance. These are reasonable questions in any case. Most people are happy to answer them but liars don't like being questioned. Pretty soon people start thinking about what they say to you first before opening their mouths. And pretty soon, too, you start hearing less bullshit (and perhaps better explanations). Your quality of life has already gone up one notch if not two!
Start listening to what you say to others. Think,”is that strictly correct?” Think about whether or not you are leaving people with an incorrect idea of what is going on i.e. misleading them. It's not the straight out lie that's so harmful, it's the deception. Deception is about what is not real. Living in “not real land” is akin to living in delusion which is insanity coming on. You don't want to go there. You're into reality now and the autonomy that it gives you. The more you practise spotting the bullshit in your own talk, the easier it is to spot in others. Authority figures rely on bullshitting you and not being challenged. You now have your first weapon against the next would be Hitler.
By being respectful of others and yourself (i.e. talking adult to adult) you upset the would be controller's playbook. Power junkies worship the hierarchical thinking of the “pecking order”because the hierarchy grants them power. It allows them to “kick down”. But it also demands that they “kiss up” and they're conditioned to it. So your would be controller's first objective is to establish if you are inferior or superior to him. If you do not give him clues that indicate you are an inferior, otherwise known as a victim, from your response, he will likely become confused and is more likely to treat you as if you are a superior, just in case.
Body language is crucial. No shuffling of shoes here! And certainly no looking down, either. Maintain eye contact. If you find that difficult, look at the bridge of their nose, the point right between their eyes. They can't tell that you are not looking into their eyes plus you can see much more of their body with your peripheral vision. Look for indications of doubt and fear in their behaviour. It's a martial arts technique. Practise it at non threatening times. It is also a handy technique to use when some bozo decides he's going to stare you down. Just look at the bridge of his nose, relax your body but pay close attention to his and tell yourself you've got all day to play this game.
If you stop accepting being jerked around you magically stop getting jerked around. It's quite amazing. It's like you have taken down that big neon sign over you head. You know the one, the one that says, "Victim"!
I have the good fortune to know a number of women who have knowingly risked their lives at different times, individually, to speak out truth against serious, organised and well-connected criminals; some of these criminals were/are in the police and government. I figure if they can do that then we can, at least, look the next intimidating punk in a uniform in the eye and ask him calmly and evenly, “Would you mind repeating that?” People who like to dominate others are by definition cowards. They have the need because they lack courage and self esteem. They made a different decision to the one we made to the same programming (I'm assuming I'm amongst friends here!). But more on this later, too.
If you are serious about wanting change, you have some homework to do. Changing will be hard only because it will rub up against your conditioning of learned obedience and learned helplessness. All the more reason to press on! Pressing on is the behaviour, indeed the hallmark, of a formidable person. It will likely displease others around you at first and this might surprise you. But this is also good because you will get to see your own conditioning concerning being an acceptable person! A formidable person is one who does not dance to other's tunes. She or he hears and follows their own piper. (that's for you, McJ!)
I have some additional homework for you, folks; some reading to fill in all that time you now have since throwing out the TeeeVeee.
Anything from Alice Miller (here's a free download of an early book, "For Your Own Good")
"Escape From Freedom" by Erich Fromm (I have to re-read this myself. So if I have to, everybody has to!)
"On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill (he makes an extremely good point, amongst others, about the making of laws to protect people from themselves) Look in the reference section of your local library.
This essay (link courtesy of Littlehorn), “Punishment Vs Restitution” by Roderick T. Long, paying particular attention to the author's notion of what is your domain or sphere of authority and what is not. I fully endorse his views on violence as well.
“The Tao of Pooh” (believe it or not!) by Benjamin Hoff. He has a lot to say about the reality of people in a very engaging way.
Read what you can find on assertiveness and on body language.
And as a parting thought, a piece of wisdom from my part of the woods,
“Never take your eye off the bully”!
As always, questions and comments sought.
Next part - On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont)
Israel’s War of Independence 1947-1948 - By Benny Morris
Fri, 03/13/2009 - 22:46 — McJI was browsing the magazine section of a book store yesterday and I noticed an article by Benny Morris on the Israeli/Palestinian '47-'48 war in the spring 2009 issue of a military history magazine. I almost bought it but then I couldn't bring myself to pay money for the war propoganda. I believe this is the article which I found at www.historynet.com. I haven't read it yet but decided to post it before I forgot about doing it. So...reader beware (or something like that.)
Lashing Back - Israel’s War of Independence 1947-1948
By Benny Morris
GUNS UP: Members of Hagdnah
celebrate breaking the Arab
forces’ blockade of Jerusalem, a
success in April 1948 that helped
to swiftly shift the momentum of
the civil war toward Jewish
forces. Photograph: AFP/Getty
Israel has fought and won three major wars in its 61-year existence. The best-known today are the Six-day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The first war it fought as a nation was in 1948, today referred to by Israelis as the “War of Independence” and by Palestinian Arabs as “al-Nakba,” the catastrophe. But perhaps the most important clashes in Israel’s relatively brief history took place in the months preceding its declaration of statehood on May 14, 1948, when the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces—aided in a minor way by the dissident groups, the IZL and the LHI—battled Arab militias in the towns and villages of Palestine and along the roads linking them. At the time, Great Britain, while nominally charged with maintaining order as it disengaged from the Palestinian territory it had ruled since 1917, focused mainly on withdrawing with minimal casualties and with its political prestige in the Middle East intact, and only occasionally intervened in the fighting.
At stake in this civil war was Israel’s existence, and in the early months the Arabs appeared to be winning. By the end of March 1948, most of the Haganah’s armored car fleet lay in ruins, and Jewish West Jerusalem, with 100,000 residents, was under siege. Had the run of successful Arab convoy ambushes continued, and had Jerusalem gone under, it seems certain that the armies of the Arab states that invaded the country seven weeks later would have aborted the tiny state before its birth.
Instead, in April 1948, with its back to the wall, the Yishuv (in Hebrew, the Settlement)—as the 630,000-strong Jewish community in Palestine called itself—struck back. In a series of campaigns lasting six weeks, they battled mercilessly with the Palestinian Arab militias and overran dozens of Arab villages and towns. Slowly but surely, the balance of the war began to tip in their favor.
By 1947, waves of immigration had brought about half a million Jews to Palestine’s shores. Most came from Eastern Europe, fleeing bouts of anti-Semitic legislation and violence—pogroms—in the czarist empire and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in central Europe, cresting with the Holocaust during World War II. Underlying their desire to return to the Land of Israel was an age-old messianic longing for the ancestral territory and the resurrection of Jewish sovereignty.
Palestinian Arab resistance to the Zionist immigration was slow to get off the mark—like Arab nationalism in general—but grew increasingly violent and increasingly religious during the 1930s, precisely when the Zionist movement was most desperately seeking a safe haven for Europe’s persecuted Jews. Even before this escalation, Jews had little trust in Palestinian Arabs. The Axis powers, Italy and Germany, had politically and economically supported the Palestine Arab revolt in 1936–1939, against both British rule and the burgeoning Zionist enterprise. And the Palestinian national movement’s leader, the anti-Jewish Muslim cleric Haj Amin al-Husseini, sat out the war years (1941–1945) in Germany, received a salary from the Third Reich’s foreign ministry, and broadcast calls to the Arab world to join in the anti-British jihad.
The Zionists feared nothing less than a second Holocaust should the Arabs win political control of Palestine, obliterating the Jews and their dreams of a homeland. And, from 1939 on, the Zionists also had to contend with a British government that had turned from pro-Zionism to appeasing the Arabs. That year London issued a new Palestine White Paper, severely curbing Jewish immigration and providing for an independent Palestine governed by its Arab majority within 10 years. In response, the clandestine Jewish militias, the mainstream Haganah and the right-wing IZL (irgun zvai leumi, or National Military Organization, which the British called the “Irgun”) and its offshoot, the LHI (lohamei herut yisrael, or Freedom Fighters of Israel; the British called it the “Stern Gang” after its leader Avraham Stern), launched a campaign to oust the British from Palestine.
The campaign had been suspended for much of the world war as Jews and Britons fought the common Nazi enemy, but it was renewed in 1944 with a surge of Irgun and Stern Gang attacks that claimed dozens of British lives. Meanwhile, the Haganah dispatched ships laden with thousands of illegal European immigrants to Palestine.
The world war had vastly weakened Great Britain. By 1947, the country no longer had the resolve to deal with the dilemma in Palestine: the Zionists demanding statehood, at least in part of the country, and the Palestinian Arabs demanding all of the country as their indivisible patrimony. The additional embarrassment of having to fight illegal immigrants, most of them Holocaust survivors, and the trauma of continuous Jewish terrorist attacks finally persuaded Whitehall to throw in the towel. In February 1947 Foreign Secretary Ernst Bevin announced that Britain would terminate its rule and hand over the Palestine problem to the United Nations.
The UN duly appointed a commission of inquiry, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), whose majority in September recommended to the General Assembly that Palestine be partitioned into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, both having sites holy to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, were earmarked for international rule. The General Assembly proceeded to reduce the size of the recommended Jewish state to 55 percent of Palestine (the Arabs were to get close to 45 percent) and voted for partition: 33 in favor (including all of Western Europe, the United States, the Soviet bloc, and most of Latin America), 13 against (mostly Arab and Muslim or partly Muslim countries), and 10 abstentions (including Britain and China).
The Zionist leadership and mainstream parties, though not the right-wing Revisionist movement, accepted the division, despite Zionism’s original quest for sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel; David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive (the Yishuv’s “government”), and Chaim Weizmann, Zionism’s most prominent statesman, bowed to the diktat of history and circumstance.
The Arab world, spearheaded by Palestine’s Arab leadership, responded with a resounding “no”—as they had in 1937, when the British Peel Commission had recommended that only 17 percent of Palestine be awarded for Jewish statehood, and most of the remainder for Arab sovereignty.
The United Nations General Assembly passed the partition resolution (No. 181) on November 29, 1947, and Palestinian Arabs, in disorganized and dispersed fashion, launched hostilities to stymie the carrying out of the resolution.
On November 30, Arab gunmen, in the first shots of the war, ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva, killing seven passengers, and snipers firing from the Arab town of Jaffa hit pedestrians in neighboring Tel Aviv. The Husseini-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the Palestinian Arabs’ “government,” called a general strike. The civil war had begun.
The two sides were ill-matched. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, was much smaller: 630,000 to the Arabs’ 1.3 million. However, the Yishuv was tightly knit, highly mobilized, largely urban, educated, European, and motivated by the trauma of the just-ended Holocaust. Their leaders were public-service oriented and committed; they included the best and the brightest.
From the 1920s into the 1940s the Yishuv had fashioned a state within a state, with its own governing institutions, including a cabinet (the Jewish Agency Executive), departments (such as the Jewish Agency political, settlement, and finance departments), and a militia, the Haganah, with some 35,000 members.
When hostilities commenced, the Haganah had about 10,000 rifles, 3,500 submachine guns, 775 light machine guns, 157 medium machine guns, 16 antitank launchers, 670 two-inch mortars, and 84 three-inch mortars. Several thousand additional light weapons were in the hands of Jewish supernumerary policemen serving the British, most of whom were Haganah members. The Haganah had several spotter aircraft, though no combat aircraft, tanks, or artillery. In the course of the civil war, Haganah armorers produced makeshift armored cars—trucks protected by steel sheeting—and thousands of Sten submachine guns, as well as light mortars, grenades, mines, and ammunition.
The Haganah had a standing, efficient strike force of some 2,000 to 3,000 members, the Palmach, which served as its backbone and shield as it mobilized and, from November 1947 to May 1948, was transformed from a militia into an army, with battalion and brigade formations. By May the Palmach could field 10 functioning, if underequipped and undermanned, brigades. Most of the Yishuv’s roughly 250 rural settlements—which were the front line for much of the civil war and the conventional interstate war that followed—had trenchworks, perimeter fences and lighting, bomb shelters, and a central armory, which usually included a few machine guns and light mortars. The Haganah was familiar with the terrain and had nowhere to flee—except into the Mediterranean.
The Palestine Arabs enjoyed the support of the vast hinterland of Arab states, who, though in niggardly fashion, sent arms, money and, between December 1947 and February 1948, a 4,000-strong force of relatively well-equipped volunteers, most of them Syrians and Iraqis, known as the Arab Liberation Army (ALA). The ALA had medium and heavy mortars, armored cars, and, by April, half a dozen field pieces.
In addition, hundreds of lightly armed Muslim Brotherhood volunteers arrived in southern Palestine from North Africa.
But the Jews had organized for war; the Arabs had not. Although each of Palestine’s approximately 800 Arab villages and towns had a local militia, each with dozens or even hundreds of personal weapons, the Palestinians had failed to put together a national militia organization—and when it came to civil war, each village, town and, at best, region fought alone against the Haganah, the Irgun and LHI. Some of the militias were obedient to the Husseini family–dominated Arab Higher Committee (AHC) that nominally governed the Arab community; others obeyed local authorities (the urban national committees or village mukhtars). The Arab militiamen probably, like the Jews, felt that they were fighting for hearth and home—but, unlike the Jews, they always had the option of flight to hinterland Arab villages and states. And their militias had almost no mortars or armored cars. The Palestinians, like the Arab states, had no independent arms production capabilities.
Palestine Arabs were largely illiterate, poor, mainly agricultural, and disunited, with a cluster of venal families, led by the Husseinis, at the helm. The leaders had little or no public-service orientation. The better-educated, wealthier Christian 8 percent of the Arab population feared the Muslim majority, townspeople looked down on fellahin (typically, farm laborers) and Bedouins (members of nomadic tribes), while fellahin feared and contemned Bedouins. The notable families had been bitterly divided since the 1920s by a power struggle between the Husseini-led leadership and the “Opposition,” led by another notable Jerusalem family, the Nashashibis.
In the late 1930s, against the backdrop of the Palestine Arab revolt, the rivalry had erupted in systematic Husseini terrorism against their Arab opponents, leaving a trail of blood feuds and treachery that was to disunite the Palestinians when they confronted the Zionists a decade later. The Palestine Arabs also failed to put together an autonomous governmental structure. The Husseini-dominated AHC nominally “governed” the Arab community—but many Arabs opposed it. At the start of the civil war, local notables from the various factions set up “national committees” in each town, which tried to run the communities during the crisis. But in effect, most of the the middle and upper classes declined to join the fight—and most of them (including many national committee members) fled the country during the following months, beginning as early as November 1947. Very few sons of the urban upper and middle classes participated in the war.
In the hilly spine of the country, running from Galilee through Samaria and Judea, the Arabs enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in numbers; there were practically no Jewish settlements. But in the areas earmarked by the United Nations for Jewish sovereignty—in the central and northern Coastal Plain, in the Jezreel and Jordan valleys and in Jerusalem—the populations were thoroughly intermixed. Along each road were Arab and Jewish villages, and many of the towns—Haifa, Safad, Tiberias—had both Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. The civil war, chaotic like most, was fought mainly in the predominantly Jewish areas. That included the lowlands—the Coastal Plain and the Jezreel and Jordan valleys—and in and around Jerusalem. In the city and its surrounds were roughly 100,000 Jews and a similar number of Arabs. Because the Arabs lacked a national militia and suffered from a deficit of national consciousness and commitment, especially among the majority rural population, the inhabitants of the core Arab areas—around Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Nazareth—did not take part in the fighting.
The Arabs may have started the war, albeit in disorganized, haphazard fashion, but they did so with widespread reluctance and deep foreboding; many, perhaps most, did not believe they could win, and lacked confidence in their political and military leaders. “The fellah is afraid of the Jewish terrorists….The town dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish force and hopes for salvation from outside….[The] majority…are confused, frightened…All they want is peace, quiet,” reported one Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) agent already in October 1947.
The first stage of the civil war was characterized by a gradual snowballing of the hostilities, which at first engulfed only some seam neighborhoods in the mixed towns and certain rural roads (the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, the north-south Jordan Valley road). At no point between November 1947 and May 1948 did the Arab Higher Committee issue a blanket order to the various militias to “assault the Yishuv.” And during the war’s first four months the AHC blew hot and cold, occasionally instructing militias to attack this or that settlement or neighborhood, at other times vaguely instructing the locals to keep their powder dry until a general assault was ordered (an order that never came). Many Arab national committees, run by the propertied middle and upper classes, were reluctant to order or allow their militiamen (and in each of the large towns—Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem—there were a number of militia groups, each loyal to a different boss) to attack the Jews for fear of Jewish retaliation, which was bound to damage property and businesses and to cost lives.
Attacks in the first four months of the war were limited to Arab bombings and snipings in the urban centers; assaults on Jewish urban neighborhoods and rural settlements; and ambushes against Jewish traffic, which from December 1947 generally moved in organized convoys, guarded by Haganah members, often riding in open vans and makeshift armored vehicles, and British armored cars. There were also, as feared, Jewish retaliatory attacks on Arab urban neighborhoods, villages, and traffic.
In December, Arab militiamen assaulted and partly took Tel Aviv’s southern Hatikva Quarter before being driven back by Jewish militiamen. The following month, the ALA’s 2nd Yarmuk Battalion, supported by local militiamen, unsuccessfully attacked Kibbutz Yehiam in Western Galilee. In February 1948, the ALA attacked Kibbutz Tirat Zvi, in the Beit Shean Valley, but the Jewish defenses (and the vastly outnumbered Jewish defenders) and the mud proved too formidable. A British relief column arrived on the scene at the end of the battle and briefly engaged the Arabs. The ALA suffered 40 to 60 dead; the kibbutzniks, one dead and one wounded.
As the war wore on, and partly in response to Jewish reprisals, the Arab militiamen also unleashed a wave of urban bombings. The focus was Jerusalem. On February 1, Arab bombers, aided by British deserters, struck the offices of the Palestine Post (today the Jerusalem Post), killing one person and injuring 20. On February 22, the bombers—most of them British deserters in this case—struck more effectively, blowing up three trucks in downtown Jerusalem’s Ben-Yehuda Street, levelling four buildings and killing 58 people. A third bomb, in an American consular car driven by an Armenian Arab, blew up in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building, killing 12.
For the first 10 days of hostilities, the Haganah limited itself to pure defense, hoping that the bout of violence would blow over after Arab tempers cooled, as had happened with previous anti-Zionist violence in 1920, 1921, and 1929.
But on December 9, 1947, the Haganah General Staff decided to change to “active defense,” maintaining a general strategy of defense while occasionally retaliating against Arab targets. For the next three months, Haganah raiders responded to attacks on Jewish targets with similar, if less frequent, attacks on Arab traffic and villages. Usually, the orders were to avoid harming women and children, though there is no evidence that such instructions were ever issued to Palestinian Arab assailants. Inevitably, noncombatants died in the Haganah reprisals, which also tended to suck more and more Arabs into the circle of hostilities.
From the start of the hostilities, the Irgun and the Stern Gang had deemed restraint a sign of weakness and ineffectiveness, and they now responded to Arab attacks with terrorism of their own; sometimes their targets were Arab militiamen and headquarters, more often the attacks were indiscriminate. In Jerusalem, Irgun men repeatedly threw grenades and bombs at milling groups of Arabs outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate; in Jaffa, in January 1948, LHI men, in a bold attack, levelled with explosives the old Saraya building, which housed a militia headquarters. In Jerusalem, also in January, the Haganah—in an uncharacteristic attack—blew up the Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon district, believing it to be a militia headquarters, though it probably wasn’t, and the Spanish vice consul was among the two dozen dead. Nonetheless, the Haganah for weeks refrained from attacking in areas not yet caught up in the fighting in the hope that the conflagration would die down.
As in all civil wars, the hostilities resulted in and were often characterized by local revenge cycles. One such cycle occurred in Haifa. On December 30, 1947, an Irgun team threw a grenade into a crowd of Arab workers at a bus stop outside the Haifa Oil Refinery gate. Eleven were killed. This triggered a rampage by the Arab workers inside the refinery compound against their Jewish coworkers, and 39 were slaughtered with knives, crowbars, and hammers. On the night of December 31, the Haganah avenged the massacre by raiding the nearby village of Balad ash Sheikh, in which many refinery workers lived. Dozens of villagers died, some dragged from their homes and executed.
A Haganah intelligence report from mid-May 1948 evaluated the Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang reprisals of December 1947 through March 1948 on the Palestine Arab community: “The main effect of these operations was on the Arab civilian population…[leading to] economic paralysis, unemployment, lack of of fuel and supplies because of the severance of transport. They suffered from the destruction of their houses and psychologically their nerves were badly hit, and they even suffered evacuations and wanderings….[All this] weakened the Arab areas and made the operations of the militiamen more difficult.” The hardier Yishuv, under similar hardships, stood fast.
That report proved to be putting a gloss over a touch-and-go situation. It’s true that from early December 1947 on, Arabs began evacuating areas near Jewish population concentrations and in seam neighborhoods in the mixed towns. By late March 1948, much of the middle- and upper-class population had left, moving either into the Arab-populated interior of Palestine (Tulkarm, Nablus, Ramallah) or out of the country, to hotels and second homes in Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. Most were fearful of being caught up in the fighting.
The Arab Higher Committee was generally opposed to evacuations but was often ambiguous in its instructions to local authorities, except with regard to young males, who were reproached for leaving. Local authorities, such as the national committee in Haifa, often advised or even ordered the population to stay put, but to little avail. In the areas earmarked for Jewish sovereignty in the partition resolution, local Arab leaders or military commanders often ordered or advised rural communities to send away their women and children if they were already engulfed in the hostilities or about to be. In the Coastal Plain, complete evacuation was ordered in a handful of villages, so they would not appear to be accepting Jewish rule. In the period from November 1947 through March 1948, only one Arab village, Qisariya (Caesarea), south of Haifa, was forcibly evacuated by the Haganah.
Down to the end of March 1948, the Haganah—and the Jewish Agency—abided by the Zionist mainstream’s policy of acquiescing in the emergence of a Jewish state with a large Arab minority. As Yisrael Galili, Ben-Gurion’s deputy as political head of the Haganah, put it in an order on March 24 to all the brigades, the organization was to respect “the rights, needs and freedom…without discrimination” of the Arab communities in the Jewish areas. (Exceptions were to be made only in the event of clear military necessity.)
Evacuations aside, by late March, the situation along the roads had steadily deteriorated, and the Haganah General Staff began to fear a Jewish collapse, at least in Jewish West Jerusalem (which, with 100,000 people, contained a sixth of the country’s Jewish population). Early in the civil war, the Arabs noted the Yishuv’s main vulnerability: the roads that linked the main urban centers to one another and to clusters of rural settlements. On December 31, 1947, Haganah intelligence reported: “The Arabs intend to paralyze all Jewish traffic on the roads within the next few days.” Gradually during the first months of 1948 the Arab militias concentrated their attention on the convoys; by March their firepower and methods of operation had proved highly successful. For the Haganah, the last weeks of March were disastrous, as they lost much of their armored car fleet and dozens of troops.
First came the convoy ambushes, all in the Jerusalem area, at Har-Tuv on March 18, Atarot on March 24, and Saris on March 24, in which a total of 26 died and 18 vehicles were destroyed. Then came two great disasters. On March 27, thousands of local militiamen swooped down on a 50-vehicle convoy heading back to West Jerusalem from the isolated Etzion Bloc—a cluster of four kibbutzim between Hebron and Bethlehem—and halted it, pouring fire on the 186 Haganah. By the following morning, the Jews’ situation was desperate. The overflights of Haganah spotter planes, dropping the occasional grenade on the militiamen, did little good. At last a British armored column got through and negotiated a ceasefire. The Haganah men were forced to abandon all their vehicles and hand over their arms. The Haganah lost 15 dead and 73 wounded, and 10 armored cars, 4 buses, and 25 armored trucks.
An even worse fate befell a smaller Haganah convoy in Western Galilee, heading for Kibbutz Yehiam, on March 27. The convoy was lost to Arab Liberation Army and local ambushers, with 47 Haganah men killed; many of the bodies recovered by the British afterwards had been mutilated. A third convoy, on its way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, was badly mauled at Hulda on March 31.
The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Gen. Alan Cunningham, understood the significance of what had occurred. “It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Yishuv and its leaders are deeply worried about the future. The intensification of Arab attacks on communications…has brought home the precarious position of Jewish communities, both great and small, which are dependent on supply lines running through Arab-controlled country,” he reported to London on April 3. “In particular it is now realized that the position of Jewish Jerusalem, where a food scarcity already exists, is likely to be desperate after 16th May.…The balance of the fighting seems to have turned much in favour of the Arabs.”
Throughout the conflict the British, gradually downgrading their military and civilian presence, tried to maintain law and order, and generally, until mid-March, aided the Haganah—with escorts for the convoys that travelled between the towns and occasional active intervention against attacking Arab militiamen. The Arabs were usually the aggressors and the British were committed to protecting life and property. At the same time, many British soldiers, for years targets of Irgun and Stern Gang terrorism, and occasionally with anti-Jewish biases, sympathized with and occasionally helped the Arabs; dozens of British deserters fought with the Arab militias.
Politically, British policy and its implementation was evenhanded. British officials and troops generally turned over their installations to the majority population in each area (and the evacuated British police stations—in reality, forts—were often to be crucial during both the civil and conventional parts of the war). But during late March to mid-May, British policy was often ambiguous, partly because continued Irgun and LHI attacks on their personnel alienated them, partly because the British commanders, about to depart, saw no point in losing men in interventions against the belligerents, and partly because Whitehall was keen on leaving behind, in the (Arab) Middle East in general, as much sympathy and friendship as possible. Zionist feelings were of much less concern in London, where the anti-Zionist foreign secretary, Ernst Bevin, ruled the roost.
The Zionist leadership was keenly aware of the impending British departure, scheduled for May 15, and the pan-Arab invasion that was to follow, as announced almost daily by the Arab leaders and media. The main Jewish areas, the roads between them, and the border areas of the emergent Jewish state all had to be secured before the Arab armies invaded—which meant that the Palestinian Arab militias had to be crushed first if there was to be any hope of beating the invaders.
Additionally, the United States in mid-March had signalled its imminent abandonment of partition. Warren Austin, the U.S. delegate, proposed to the Security Council on March 19 that the United Nations suspend implementing Resolution 181 and impose an open-ended UN trusteeship on Palestine. It was clear to Ben-Gurion that the international community would follow the American lead—unless the Yishuv could prove that it was viable by defeating the Palestinian Arabs and establishing a state.
No one was more acutely aware of the deteriorating situation for the Zionists than Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv’s “defense minister.” He was particularly perturbed by the fate of Jewish Jerusalem, whose fall, he knew, would be a mighty blow to the Jewish side.
At a nightlong meeting with the Haganah General Staff on March 31–April 1, he decided to mount an operation in the Jerusalem sector that was to inaugurate a general change of strategy—going from the defensive to the offensive.
Haganah also switched to the offensive in early April simply because it could. It had mobilized and trained a small army organized into battalions and brigades, and arms from Czechoslovakia, purchased by Zionist agents, had at last begun arriving in Palestine. A first shipment arrived by air on the night of March 31; a second, larger shipment, arrived by ship in Tel Aviv on April 2—all together 4,700 rifles, 240 medium machine guns, and 5.2 million rounds of ammunition. At last the Haganah would have a relatively large supply of weapons at hand to divert to a particular front. (Most of its arms until then had been dispersed among the different localities, in defense, and the localities refused to “loan” the headquarters arms, fearing they would be attacked when the arms were elsewhere.)
The offensive decided upon on the night of March 31, dubbed “Operation Nahshon,” was designed to force open the Hulda–Jerusalem section of the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road so that several large food, fuel, and munitions convoys could push through to the besieged capital. Shimon Avidan commanded the operation. The German-born, 36-year-old Avidan, operations commander of the Givati Brigade, had been actively organizing illegal immigration from Europe at the end of World War II—and executing Nazi war criminals.
Nahshon involved some 1,500 troops. As it turned out, it was to be the first of a succession of offensive operations—most of them triggered by Arab attack, siege, or pressure—that represented the piecemeal, staggered implementation of Tochnit Dalet (Plan D) and, taken together, quickly resulted in the conquests of Arab towns, urban neighborhoods, and swaths of countryside. From early April, although Haganah leaders did not agree on or institute a blanket policy of expulsion, an atmosphere of “transfer” took hold among them as margins of safety narrowed and as the prospective pan-Arab invasion loomed. Facing a war for survival, the Yishuv took off the gloves.
Plan D had been finalized on March 10 by the 32-year-old Yigael Yadin, chief of operations of the Haganah and, in effect, its chief of general staff through the 1948 war. The plan was a blueprint for Haganah operations, originally scheduled to be unleashed during the fortnight before the final British pullout, and was designed to prepare for the expected pan-Arab invasion. It authorized the Haganah brigades to secure the main routes between the Jewish centers of population, the main Jewish urban concentrations and the border areas, and potential Arab invasion routes. It gave the Haganah brigade OCs carte blanche with regard to Arab villages—to conquer and garrison villages or to destroy them and expel their inhabitants. Each brigade was assigned specific targets.
(Arab and pro-Arab chroniclers, like Walid Khalidi and Ilan Papper, were later to define Plan D as the “master plan” for expelling the Palestine Arabs—but it was not, although in putting the plan into effect, commanders depopulated large chunks of Arab territory.)
Nahshon—in effect, the first stage of Plan D—was unleashed on April 2 and 3 with the conquest of the Arab hilltop village of al-Kastal, which dominated the road to Jerusalem. During the following days, Haganah battalions conquered a handful of Arab villages along the road—which served as the militias’ bases—and pushed two and a half supply-laden convoys to Jerusalem. On April 8, a Haganah sentry killed Abdel Qadir al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab militias in the Jerusalem hills area and the Palestinian Arabs’ foremost military commander, at Kastal as he approached the village, which he thought had already been retaken by his irregulars. A few hours later, the Arabs retook the village—but then abandoned it and streamed to Jerusalem for Husseini’s funeral. Palmach troops then peacefully reoccupied the village. The day before he died, Husseini, a cousin of Haj Amin’s, had jotted down a poem, dedicated to his son Faisal (later a senior PLO official):
This land of the brave is the land of our forefathers.
The Jews have no right to this land.
How can I sleep while the enemy rules it?
Something burns in my heart.
My homeland beckons.
Husseini’s death was a major blow to the Palestinian cause. So, for different reasons, was a second incident during Nahshon: the conquest of the village of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Stern Gang troops (marginally assisted by Haganah) on April 9. In the course of the fight, four Jewish soldiers were killed and several dozen were wounded. One hundred ten of the villagers, including women and children, died, some massacred after the battle. The survivors were then trucked to Arab East Jerusalem where they told horrific tales of Jewish atrocities, some of them true. These were subsequently broadcast by Arab radio stations—who exaggerated the number of Arab dead—in the hope of persuading other Arab villages to fiercely resist conquest.
Instead, the broadcasts had a boomerang effect and triggered mass Arab flight around the country. The Haganah Intelligence Service defined Deir Yassin as “a major accelerating factor” in the mass exodus that was set off by the Haganah shift to the offensive. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Arabs left their homes from April through June 1948, becoming displaced persons.
Arab militiamen eventually resealed the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road and reinstated the siege of the capital. But Nahshon, which lasted until April 15, was a pivotal event. It heralded the Haganah’s shift to the offensive, which proved decisive. For the first time, the organization had deployed a brigade-sized force, had cleared a swath of Arab territory, and, together with the Irgun and Stern Gang, had incited widespread flight from rural Palestine. During the following days the focus of the fighting switched to the country’s urban centers.
From April 16 through 18, Haganah troops defeated the Arab militia in the mixed town of Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, which resulted in the Arabs’ organized departure under British escort. The town’s militiamen had interdicted Jewish traffic between the Jezreel and Beit Shean valleys and the upper Jordan Valley settlements to the north. Some of the approximately 5,000 Arab townspeople were trucked out to Nazareth; others fled to Transjordan. The Jews issued no expulsion order but it seems that the local British commanders had advised the Arabs to leave, arguing that they would have no protection after the British departed.
Haifa followed. Haifa was Palestine’s most modern city and the country’s main port, earmarked, like Tiberias, by the UN partition plan for Jewish sovereignty. For decades its Arabs and Jews had lived in relative harmony. At the end of 1947 it had about 70,000 Jews, and a slightly smaller number of Arabs.
On April 21, the Haganah, based in the Carmel Mountain Jewish neighborhoods that dominated the Arab-populated Lower City, attacked the seam neighborhoods. The British northern region commander, Gen. Hugh Stockwell, did not intervene in the fighting, though he prevented reinforcements from reaching the town from nearby Arab villages. Stockwell was interested in a swift end to the battle since Haifa was the main departure point from Palestine for the remaining British civilian administrators and military. The Arab militias quickly collapsed, their leaders fleeing the city at the start of the battle. By the afternoon of April 22, it was all over.
That afternoon, Gen. Stockwell organized a meeting of the remaining Arab leaders and Jewish representatives in the town hall to hammer out terms of surrender (which the Arabs insisted on calling a “truce”).
But the Arabs rejected what Stockwell deemed the Haganah’s moderate terms and announced instead that they would all depart the city. Apparently they feared that the Husseinis would consider them traitors should they remain, surrender, and accept Jewish rule. In the following days, the Arab population began leaving, by boat or in British-escorted transports. By early May, only some 5,000 Arabs remained in Haifa.
The fall and evacuation of Arab Haifa undermined the staying power of Arab communities throughout the north. In itself, this accounted for about one-tenth of the war’s Arab refugees.
Without doubt, Haifa also affected Jaffa. The Haganah had decided to leave Jaffa alone, believing it—with 70,000 to 80,000 Arabs, the largest Arab city in Palestine—would fall once the British left. The partition resolution had earmarked Jaffa as a sovereign Arab enclave inside the Jewish state area.
But the Irgun also sought to emerge from the war with a bit of glory—and Jaffa had been harassing Tel Aviv, the Irgun’s main base of power, since November. The Irgun commanders, directed by the organization’s leader Menachem Begin, decided to take Jaffa. On April 25, six Irgun companies attacked the southern part of Manshiya, Jaffa’s northernmost neighborhood, threatening to cut it off from the town center, which they proceeded to barrage with mortars for three days.
By April 27, after hard house-to-house fighting with the local militiamen, the Irgun troops had reached the Mediterranean—and Manshiya was cut off. Its population fled southward.
This time, the British reacted—after being blamed throughout the Arab world for the fall of Arab Haifa and “collusion” with the Jews. Bevin sought to prove that he was the Arabs’ friend. He ordered in the Royal Air Force—which strafed a Jewish position—some destroyers, and an armored column, proceeding to push out the Irgun force. But Jaffa’s reprieve was short-lived. As chaos reigned during the following fortnight, most local inhabitants fled, and Arab militiamen, including an ALA contingent, and British troops looted the abandoned houses. On May 13, with the British gone, Haganah units quietly occupied the town. Only some 4,000 Arabs remained.
The Jewish offensives also encompassed rural areas. In Operation Hametz, at the end of April, Haganah troops conquered the rural hinterland east of Jaffa. From April 15 through mid-May, other Haganah units, in Operation Yiftah, conquered Eastern Galilee, humbling the Arab Liberation Army and local militiamen. Yigal Allon commanded the operation. The Palestine-born officer in command of the Palmach was the Haganah’s best field commander. (During the following months, he was to display his skills when, in charge of the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Front, he defeated the Egyptian Army in operations Yoav and Horev.)
The Palmach took Safad—the “capital” of Eastern Galilee—originally with some 10,000 Arabs and 1,500 mostly Orthodox Jews, on May 9 and 10, the Arabs fleeing eastward, to Syria. Beit Shean, the Arab town at the center of the Beit Shean Valley, fell three days later, the inhabitants mostly going to Jordan. A few days after that, Jewish forces expelled those who remained to Nazareth. The rural areas of Eastern Galilee—designated for Jewish sovereignty—also fell to the Haganah. In all, the operation had also helped seal off the likely invasion routes from Syria.
The coastal area of Western Galilee was next. In Operation Ben-Ami, a two-battalion column of Haganah’s Carmeli Brigade pushed north from Haifa’s suburbs on May 13; additional troops landed by sea at the small Jewish resort town of Nahariya. In 36 hours, the column linked up with the Nahariya forces and the isolated Jewish settlements of Eilon and Hanita, on the Lebanese border. They occupied and systematically levelled Arab villages along the way. Their populations had fled as the Jewish column approached.
In the second stage of Ben-Ami, on May 20–22, Carmeli units pushed east, widening the Jewish-held area in Western Galilee. The operation, which had closed off the planned Lebanese army invasion route into Palestine, had probably helped to persuade the Lebanese to stay out of the war.
During the last days of the civil war, as Arab Palestine was collapsing and the Yishuv braced for the pan-Arab onslaught, both sides tried to marginally improve their positions along what had become continuous front lines. Jewish troops of the Givati Brigade occupied a handful of Arab villages in the south, trying to block the expected Egyptian invasion routes and deny the Egyptians the Palestinian-inhabited forward bases. For their part, the Arabs—spearheaded by several companies of Jordanian troops with gun-mounting armored cars, who were seconded to the British Army in Palestine until May 14—attacked the Etzion Bloc.
The attack was probably ordered by Gen. John Glubb, the British commander of the Jordanian army (known as the Arab Legion), and led by Col. Abdullah Tal, the commander of the Legion’s 6th Battalion. The Jewish defenders were badly outgunned—they had no artillery or antitank guns, and only a few PIATs (projector, infantry, antitank—a type of bazooka), whereas the Legion deployed gun-mounting armored cars and heavy mortars.
The main settlement, Kfar Etzion, fell on May 13. As the Jewish troops surrendered, they were massacred by militiamen. Some Jordanian officers apparently tried to save some Jews, although others participated in the killing. All together, about 150 prisoners of war were killed. The next day, their position having been rendered untenable, the three remaining settlements surrendered. However, these combatants were shipped off to Jordanian prisoner of war camps. On May 15 the bulk of the Arab Legion crossed the Jordan into Palestine and linked up with the stay-behind companies, including those in the ruined Etzion Bloc.
But the Etzion Bloc was the exception. By May 15, the Haganah and its allies had essentially won the Palestine civil war of 1947–1948. In doing so, they had managed to carve out and consolidate the core of a state.
It comprised a continuous strip—actually three linked strips—of territory (the Jordan Valley, the Jezreel Valley, and the northern and central Coastal Plain), with two adjacent, if semi-besieged, enclaves to the east (Jewish Jerusalem) and south (the Negev settlements zone)—from which it was to face, and eventually contain and repel, the invading armies of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.
The Yishuv suffered 1,700 to 1,800 dead in the course of the civil war (and another 4,000 dead during the conventional war of the Arab invasion). The community incurred severe infrastructure and economic damage. But, apart from the Etzion Bloc, it had lost no settlements, and financial aid began to pour in from world Jewry.
Arab society in Palestine had been shattered. The Palestinian Arabs had failed to establish a state or even to secure for themselves any part of Palestine. Their losses, in casualties, were probably two or three times as large as the Jewish totals—and their economic losses were much larger. The refugees ultimately landed in the Arab states or the areas these states were about to occupy in Palestine—the West Bank near Jordan and the Gaza Strip near Egypt—and were to be a burden on these states. The refugee problem, which was to grow threefold during the following months, was to destabilize the Middle East during the following decades, and Palestine remains a problem on the international agenda.
The defeat of the Palestinian Arabs, without doubt, forced the Arab states’ hand and pushed their leaders into fulfilling their promises to invade Palestine—and attack Israel—on May 15. The most moderate of the Arab leaders, King Abdullah of Jordan (who in 1947 had secretly agreed with the Jewish Agency to share Palestine between them) on May 10—the eve of the invasion—explained to Golda Myerson (Meir), the Jewish Agency representative, that he was now one of a five-member coalition and could not act independently. “After Deir Yassin, Tiberias and Haifa,” much to his reluctance, he would have to participate in the invasion and the war. And so he did.
But the civil war also affected the Yishuv, now the state of Israel. It emboldened the Yishuv’s political leaders to decide, on May 12, to declare the establishment of the state, against advice from the United States—and despite the certain prospect of pan-Arab invasion. (The Americans pressed the Zionists for a postponement, knowing that the declaration would provoke the invasion and possibly pull the United States into the war to defend Israel. But this did not happen. During the following months, Israel managed to defeat the Arab armies all by itself, while the United States continued to refuse to sell Israel any arms or provide any other nondeclarative help.)
The civil war successes steeled the Yishuv as it faced the Arab states’ armies, and provided the Haganah with a great deal of military experience and self-confidence—both of which were to prove important in containing and eventually beating the invading Arab armies. MHQ
Homeland Security Video Podcasts: Milgram's Muppets
Fri, 03/13/2009 - 11:12 — ICGREENViewpoints In Homeland Defense And Security
Homeland Security Leaders Give Opinions on Current Issues and Challenges (Author: NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security)
http://www.podanza.com/podcast/viewpoints-in-homeland-defense-and-securi...
The above site has video podcasts in which "Homeland Security Leaders Give Opinions on Current Issues and Challenges". I watched a couple of pod casts this morning.
The interviewers and their guests speak in very reasonable sounding tones. They sit up tall and straight, yet relaxed, and enunciate clearly. The issues they address are real.
In "Managing The Data Explosion" in fusion centers where the analysts tackle all hazards and all crimes they talk about circular reporting. Everybody keeps sending the same information around and around. Just like we get the same joke via email. It comes as tube, then someone takes a few lines out of it and sends it as text. Then it shows up on an RSS feed or something.Then you send it out to two different mailing lists, and your friend Bob is on both lists and then takes credit for originating the joke. Homeland Security wants to control all that so their analysts don't have to slog through it all to solve hazards and crimes. That's a real data management issue, I guess.
After they have solved abstracting and distributing:
"There will be a day when we turn to citizens to become collectors of information. And that information will be flowing through the centers. And that information will be analyzed not just by the police but by many other disciplines and then the data needs to be pushed out through those other disciplines."
Am I dreaming?
Anyways,
In the award-winning "Chds Thesis Series Spring 2008: Introducing The Future Now: Using Memetics And Popular Culture To Identify The Post 9/11 Homeland Security Zeitgeist" the interviewee in the podcast describes how she has tracked "memes", aka units of communication, like "Where's the beef?" She has found that the original intent of some of Homeland Security's memes have been morphed in popular culture to the point where Homeland Security is another way of saying "the bad guys". This is important for Homeland Security because the next time they have a message they are going to have to be more careful about their memes.
The issues for both of the interviewees are real except, perhaps, the raison d'être for the entire effort. There were some real issues for the subjects of Milgram's experiments, too. Like exactly when and how to push the button that tortured the victim. "Why?" was the real issue, though.
Are these video pod casts actual recordings of Milgram's Muppets? It's fun to watch just like a Muppet show.
Are the Homeland Security Memes delivered in a strong, clear, authoritative voice? Is that why they continue to press the buttons that sends electronic shocks through the constitution and shocks through people in ways the constitution never conjectured?
Have they caught any bad guys yet? They have made a bunch up. They have tortured lots. They let the ones they know about walk away into lovely retirements.
Rolling Stone magazine reports on the big brother Golden Shield in China, and in another article shows that Homeland Security hasn't caught anybody yet.
Winter Patriot cast very serious doubts about the veracity of the terror plots, from the ridiculous liquid bombers to a punk trading crappy old stereo speakers for a hand grenade. The security forces haven't caught anybody they didn't make up themselves.
But they are getting better and better at knowing when to push the buttons. In fact, they investigate credit card fraud. But they won't be hired to actually wire up the system because then they would find out that the wires don't actually do what they think they do.
They could be really good actors and know already. Hard to say.
Rashid Rauf
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/search/label/Rashid%20Rauf
Golden Shield:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/
Warring World(s) Part 4b Introduction to "The System" (cont)
Tue, 03/10/2009 - 17:00 — jamesPrevious part Part 4a Introduction to "The System"
Part 4b INTRODUCTION TO “THE SYSTEM” (cont)
A friend asked me the other night what I meant when I said this current financial fiasco was deliberately engineered. I started to think about gearing and derivatives (such as I understand them) and the bundling of dodgey loans with good ones and onselling them to unsuspecting (but greedy) investors, lending policies and the “Gnomes of Zurich”. (You never hear about the Gnomes anymore. I miss them!). But I quickly realised that what was needed was a foundational understanding about what money is, what it is supposed to be and how it comes into being and by whom. It had to be short and simple explanation, too, because it really is simple and a long explanation would lose that. If you can grab the simplicity of it, you will never be bamboozled by any schtick. So I said, “let me think about it and I'll get back to you”. So on to the computer I went and hit the Google button (actually the Cuil button) to find what I was after. I didn't find it. Then I thought I need to write about the “Moneychangers” anyway, so why not set out the banking system as simply as I could in that essay. So here it is. I hope old hands at this stuff will bear with me.
In Medieval times, Christians weren't permitted to lend money at interest. This was called usury and was a sin. Jews weren't permitted to lend money at interest to fellow Jews but they could lend and charge interest to outsiders, read Christians. So, the religious law from two religions created an industry and a market and a captive one at that. (Later when Christians began to lend money at interest, usury was redefined to mean charging interest at exorbitant rates rather than any rate). This arrangement created some animosity, as you would expect. Shakespeare's “Merchant of Venice” with its depiction of the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, is a good example of it. In fact, it added a word to the lexicon, shylocking, as an alternative to the term loansharking. Jews seem to be associated in history with moneychanging and moneylending in the popular imagination and with some reason.
What makes shylocking or loansharking so insidious is not just the high rate of interest charged but the fact that the interest is compounded i.e. interest is charged on interest. The debt explodes exponentially and soon threatens to devour the hapless debtor. Where did this poisonous notion of compound interest originate? Where else but Babylon! Yes, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is credited with inventing compound interest. And it was during his reign that the Jews were in exile there. Judaism was a literate culture and so Judean slaves were sought after as administrators. It is reasonable, I think, to assume that some of the Jewish slaves worked with the system and became very familiar with it. I think it reasonable to assume also that it was the Jews who brought the concept, and indeed the practice, of usury with its compound interest from Babylon through to more modern times.
The problem with compound interest, as I said before, is that it grows exponentially and, also, that it is infinite in nature. But this is a finite world. Certainly our hapless debtor has a finite amount of time and energy to devote to paying off his debt. The finite time limitation of a debtors life has been gotten around in some countries through the practice of inheriting debts from the previous generation. It is also achieved when a government enters into debt as a government lives on from one generation to the next. There is still, though, the finite resources of people and raw materials. So, we now have an infinite variable in a finite equation. This will not lead to a happy ending.
Usury (and I use the word in its original and correct sense) is mostly the province of banks these days. In Medieval times it was largely the province of goldsmiths who were most often Jewish and who were the forerunners of our present day bankers. They started what would become known as the Fractional Reserve Banking system only in those times it would be more accurate to call it fraud. People who had gold in any sizable amount would leave it with goldsmiths for safekeeping, literally, i.e. to keep it in their safes. The goldsmiths would sometimes offer to lend the gold out at interest and charge a margin for doing so. This was fine and dandy (even if it was a sin for the gold owner and now lender). Sometimes a gold depositer would travel and to save the danger of being robbed while en route with his gold, he would avail himself of the practice that goldsmiths had evolved for themselves of dealing in gold receipts or what we might now call cheques. The goldsmiths kept accounts with each other and would settle any differences after a period of trading in these receipts (or cheques) periodically. A traveller could put his gold on deposit with one goldsmith and receive a receipt for it and “cash it in” with another goldsmith upon arrival at his destination. Pretty neat system, yes? Yes, but there's a twist and here comes the fraud.
After a while the goldsmiths found that not every depositor came on the same day to withdraw all his gold. In fact, they discovered that all they needed was about 10% to cover claims and most of the gold wasn't physically lent out anyway but rather the loans took the form of receipts backed by the gold on deposit. All this amounted to a golden opportunity (sorry about the pun) for the goldsmiths. They could use all the gold on deposit as the 10% cover for claims. In other words, they could lend out ten times the value of gold they actually had. So if a goldsmith had 10 million shekels worth of gold in his safe, he could make one 100 million shekels worth of loans and if he paid 3% to the depositor and charged 6% to the lenders he was in clover. 100 million at 6% is 6 million less 10 million at 3% which is 0.3 million leaves a profit of 5.7 million or 57% per annum. This really is a goldmine! Modern bankers essentially do the same thing except they don't even need gold now. So if you ever wondered how the Rothschilds, for instance, got so rich, now you know.
To explain how the modern bankers do it without gold, I will use an example involving the cheque book system. A cheque is a promisory note or simply a promise to pay. It's not the money itself. Suppose you want to buy a new car. You go to the bank and they approve a loan for you. They don't hand over a bag of cash. The give you a line of credit or the same thing by another name. What they do is allow you to overdraw your account. So you can write out a cheque for say $20k and they won't bounce it. They will honour it, in other words, with someone else's money, you think. But not so.
OK, you've selected your car and write the nice car salesman, Honest John, out the cheque for $20k and hand it over. You may think you have spent your money but you haven't yet. Nothing has changed with your account at the bank. The Honest John takes your cheque to his bank and deposits it into his account. His balance goes up by $20k and at that point the money supply i.e. the total amount of money in the nation (which is made up of all the credit balances in all the bank accounts) available to purchase goods and services has just increased by $20k. Money has been created. John's bank then sends the cheque to your bank and your account is now $20k in the red. At this moment the national debt which includes all the debit balances in all the bank accounts in the nation has just gone up $20k, too. The new money has been created by new debt and the banks' Double Entry bookeeping systems (collectively) balance and everything looks hunky-dory. Nobody's money was borrowed. The new money was created by a bookeeping entry, out of nothing, out of thin air, if you like. Isn't that neat? Bankers think it's beautiful because they get to charge interest on that money which costs them virtually nothing because the interest they pay on credit balances in chequeing accounts such as Honest John's amount to bugger all, to use the technical term. Nearly all the money of a nation is created in this manner and so it attracts interest. How would you like to issue the money supply, the currency, of a nation, all of it, and get paid interest on all of it? Now, that's really neat. And it's legal now (well, sort of). But it is still fraud.
It's fraud because the backing for the money supply (the nation's currency) that gives it value is not gold (fictitious or otherwise) in a safe somewhere any more but the GDP of the nation; the value of the production, the wealth created in any given year by the population as a whole. None of it is produced by the bankers. They didn't produce it so don't own the backing of the currency and therefore should not be paid the interest on it. The interest belongs to the producers, the people who provide the value for it, or their representative government. If governments received the interest on the Money Supply, you could probaly forget about taxes. They would be very drastically reduced, at any rate. This is an immense scam perpertrated on the public. What lengths do you think the psychopaths running this scam will go to to protect it and keep it going? If history is anything to go by, any length at all. This scam, by the way, is unconstitutional both in the US and in my country, Australia. Both countries' constitutions charge the government with the responsibility of issuing the country's currency. So it's arguably legal but only arguably. It doesn't seem to bother them, though, and you'll see why shortly if you can't see it or don't know it already.
But first there are a few more wrinkles to explain. The banks create and lend money and they also control who they lend it to. They play favourites and this is how an elite class grows up around the bankers and how they keep much of the hoi-poloi struggling. They need to do this to keep labour competing for the demeaning jobs in their overbearing corporations. The poor aren't poor because the rich are rich, by the way. The poor are poor because the rich choke down the economy to maintain scarcity for a sizable section of the community. This gives them power.
The other thing they control is the overall level of production in the nation. They do this by varying the amount of the Money Supply, the money in circulation that we need to spend to buy things, through the amount of loans they make day to day, month to month and creating booms and busts in the process. The money is created through loans and is similarly extinguished when they are paid back so new loans have to be created of a similar amount to maintain the level of the money supply. If they are not, then the money supply shrinks over time and that means there is less money to buy the nation's production and therefore production is wound back and unemployment is created instead. This is the bust and is exactly what is being experienced around the world at the moment and for this same reason. The US government, in particular, is throwing money at the banks but they are not lending it on and thereby deliberately creating this recession, soon to become depression. They are shrinking the Money Supply even while all this money is being thrown at them. If the government lent the money directly to the public and businesses, there would not be a problem any longer. It's that simple.
Always before a bust, there is a boom. The psychopaths that run our banks periodically lend money seemingly without restraint but always covered by mortgages or titles over assets. Everybody gets busy building products and businesses and lots of wealth is created inspite of the interest that is charged on the money that enables all the exchanging going on. This extra interest is, of course, a boon to the bankers. When everybody is loaded to the maximum with debt, the banks start shrinking the new loans rate and often raising the interest rate as well. Though, not this time. Money gets “tight”, literally. It's one big game of musical chairs now as people scramble to get increasingly scarce cash to make their payments. Some lose out and lose their homes and businesses. The bankers and their surrounding clique get to buy up some cheap assets now. So, through boom AND bust, they win.
It's like a big economic suction pump. When the loans are freely flowing it is like the upstroke of the pump. It is being primed with the wealth from the toil of the public and the interest from the wealth goes to the bankers. When the loans and therefore the Money Supply shrink, it is like the down stroke of the pump and a goodly proportion of that wealth itself is squeezed up to the bankers and their surrounding elite who have done nothing except provide a bookeeping service. This is psychopathic behaviour.
There is one last nasty direct consequence of this system. When a loan is issued, the money comes into being and so the loan principal can be paid back in full. However, the loan attracts interest and must be paid with money but the money to pay the interest has not been created through a loan and so doesn't exist. The debt now is larger than the amount of money in existence and so cannot be paid unless a further loan to cover the interest is made. But this is just putting off the inevitable day and, in fact, making it worse because now there is interest due on the interest! This is the reason why any nation's national debt is far, far larger than it's Money Supply. If all the money was used to pay off bank debts, there would still be debts owing. It is not a sustainable system, to say the least.
I mentioned before that this activity of creating the nation's Money Supply is illegal, or at least unconstitutional, and yet they don't seem to worry about it. Here's why. This corrupt process delivers massive wealth into the hands of these psychopaths and they use it to corrupt the whole system of society. They buy off the politicians and the judiciary to pass and interpret the laws that cover the unconstitutionality of their practice. They buy the lawyers and the media to be their mouthpieces and give them respectability. They buy the police and the security agencies both directly and through the government to harrass and otherwise deal with any credible threats to their position. They buy the government and create bogus oversight commissions. They buy and sell anything and anybody. Welcome to the machine!
Of course, changing the form of government to a totalitarian one would remove any potential to correct this questionable legality and unquestionable immorality. Welcome to the future (if they can pull it off which is by no means certain).
Here endeth Part 4, the description of the three pillars of our all pervasive “System”; Religion, the Law and the Banks and the two mechanisms which facilitate it, the hierarchy and debt money with compound interest, ironically brought to us by the two religions of our culture. Needless to say, all three pillars dominate through employing fear and deceit. But with knowledge, deceit is dispelled and fear also. At least, the fear that is programmed in. They still have fear that can be induced by violence but that will not be enough to save them. They tell us that through their behaviour because if violence was enough they wouldn't invest all this effort to deceive and programme us. Now there's a somewhat happy thought to end this Part with!
Next Part - Part 5a. On Becoming a Formidable Foe
Warring World(s) Part 4a Introduction to "The System"
Tue, 03/10/2009 - 00:15 — jamesPrevious Part 3 here
Part 4a Introduction to “The System”
Part 1 focused on the enemy being the psychopaths in our societies and not the people the psychopaths point us at. That these psychopaths create and market wars for their own profit and that the wars are ultimately against the rest of humanity who are largely uneducated to this ruse.
Part 2 sought to expound a little on how psychopaths think; how they are fundamentally different from the rest of us; how they have no conscience and what that means. I probably should have included in Part 2 how people generally become enamored with power and how this can lead to psychopathy. I will make amends for that now and will then look at how these psychopaths leverage their corrupt mindset into real power over our society by looking at the three main institutions or professions and the two mechanisms they use. But first, power.
We have lots of sayings in our culture that show a common knowledge of the effects of power but these are never acknowledged by those in power who, of course, are the very ones suffering from them. Some of these sayings are: “He's drunk with power”; “The power has gone to his head”; and my favourite (of Scottish heritage, I believe), “The working class can kiss my arse, I've got the foreman's job at last”! We know instinctively what they are conveying; that people exercising power over others change. Their attitudes, politics, priorities and even worldviews change and change for the worse. Arrogance goes up and compassion and common sense goes down. They become immature and insufferable yet they would have you think they are now superior. What is going on here? Where else or in whom else do we see this metamorphosis?
During my life, from early childhood onwards, I have had to deal with many alcoholics both within and without my family. Similarly, I have also had to deal with many psychopaths also both within and without my family. I am very familiar with both groups. It was a memorable day, indeed, the day I realised there was a striking similarity between the two and what that meant. And it was this; that both groups ended up with upside down priorities and engaging in behaviour that was destructive to both themselves and others and being seemingly totally oblivious to or caring about the consequences. Upon further thought, I realised that they both got to the point of their seemingly insane behaviour by the same process; incrementally, bit by little bit. At each step losing sight of where they had come from, the change that had occurred in themselves. I realised that the same delusional process was at work in both groups.
Deep sea divers can sometimes suffer from what is called “rapture of the deep” where narcosis sets in and the diver experiences this state of euphoria and thinking he is blissfully safe and in control when, in fact, he is in deep and imminent danger. This process of narcosis is the path trod by all substance abusers and addicts. I was very familiar with this phenomenon in alcoholics and now I saw that it happened with psychopaths as well. Psychopaths have the same pathology as addicts.
If you have a tendency to dismiss psychopathy because you cannot imagine people behaving like that, then just think about addicts and their behaviour. It happens.
So if psychopaths behave like addicts, what are they addicted to? The answer seems obvious, doesn't it? Power, power over other people. To quote “The Oracle” again, “What do men with power want? More Power”. Quotes such as this from the movie “The Matrix” hit you because you already know the truth of them.
I have argued previously that we are not given power over others. This is God's province and he has granted us free will so even he is not exercising power over us. “That all men are created equal” is pronounced as self evident and is accepted as such because it is (if that's not too circular). Exercising power over others finds its ultimate expression and ultimate offensiveness in torture. Torture, pared down to its essence, is an attempt on the part of the torturer to replace God in the life of the tortured with himself. I will return later to this subject of torture and talk of its ability sometimes to bring about psychopathy, particularly in children.
Exercising power over others is addictive and also narcotic i.e. it may feel good but it induces a delusion. It affects the mind's ability to accurately perceive reality and to exercise control over itself, to restrain itself. It slowly shuts down the voice of conscience. Life becomes the singular pursuit of the addictive substance, power over others, and woe betide anybody who gets between and addict and his life's desire. If pursued far enough and long enough, psychopathy is the outcome. As we are all susceptible to drug addiction, so are we also susceptible to power addiction but we restrain ourselves. We choose not to commit to this dark path. Somehow, I think that most people have an appreciation of this destructive process. Yet all of our institutions in society are structured as if this didn't happen. The hierarchy is the dominant structure used and not only does the hierarchy not encourage restraint, it rewards the opposite, dominance and exploitation. A look at these institutions and particularly the ones that are the pillars of “The System” is next. To start, I would like to briefly return to the New Testament Gospels.
Jesus paid out big time on three groups, the priests, the scribes (lawyers) and the moneychangers. These three groups conspired together in Judean society to exploit most of the people. Nothing has changed! These three groups down through the ages have manufactured misery and fear when none was necessary so as to gain privilege and power over others for themselves. They did it by working on peoples' minds. This is a crucial point because in it lies the key to our liberation from these same groups who are still doing it to this day.
First, the priests. Our dominant Christian culture was fostered first by the Catholic Church and it still remains a powerful force in our society. Various reformations caused rival denominations to be established and these denominations seem to be forever splitting. Each time saying the “old” denomination was wrong. No argument there from me! But, unfortunately, the new group always takes the really bad part with them; the desire to dominate and the structure to do it with.
Though Christianity was persecuted by the Jews and the Romans, it flourished for three hundred years. Christianity took the form of many small regional churches. They co-operated with each other but were autonomous. Then the Emperor Constantine came along. He had two problems. The first one was that he didn't have enough troops to maintain the level of control he wanted over his empire (and, anyway, to do so would have bankrupted his treasury). Constantine set about resolving this problem by instituting his own church, or religion to be more accurate. He reasoned that it was more effective to control people psychologically through religion than physically through the use of soldiers.
He started out by putting all church leaders on the state payroll making them psychologically and financially dependent on the State and thus separating them (in their own minds) from their flocks. Next he announced the Council of Nicea whereby all church leaders were required to attend. Money buys compliance. Constantine promptly locked them all up and said they weren't getting out till they had formed themselves into a monolithic church and agreed on a common set of beliefs (this became known as the Nicene Creed). This resulting church would be given the authority of the State, be financed by the State and take its direction from the Emperor. Again, money buys compliance. For more information on this, I suggest you read Malachi Martin's, "The Fall and Decline of the Roman Church".
According to the Gospels, Jesus was given a similar offer by Satan when he was tempted in the desert, "All this", he said, indicating “The World”, "I will give to you if you but bow down and worship me". But Jesus rejected the offer. However, the church elders when faced with the same offer rather unwisely did not. That wasn't the end of it, either. There were many other religions in the empire which couldn't be left to themselves as this would frustrate Constantine's plan for a “Universal” religion, a one stop God-shop for the whole empire. Constantine was into centralisation. The largest one of these other religions was Mithraism. Mithraism worshiped the sun god Mithra. So, in fact, Constantine formed a new religion out of these two. For sure, Christianity was dominant but it took on a new character, one of dominance and power. The Mithraism was included through adoption of their winter solstice festival (birth of the new sun in the heavens and the birth of Mithra which was witnessed by shepherds and Magi bearing gifts!). This became Christmas (birth of God's Son on Earth and the Christmas story) and the spring fertility celebration (bunny rabbits laying eggs!) worshiping Astare (there are various spellings) which became known as Easter. The head would be known thereafter as “Pope” presumably after “Pater Patratus” the title of the head of Mithraism (both titles mean “father”). The title "Pontiff" belonged to the Emperor but was later appropriated by the RCC. The day of worship became Sunday in deference to the Mithraists. Churches (the buildings, that is) were thereafter oriented East-West to face the dawn sun and the whole occult fascination with magical thinking, magical rituals and playing dress-ups came along for the ride. Mithraism was a warlike religion and this spirit seems to have carried over into the new offspring, the RCC. And we now had a priest class which didn't exist previously (King James version of the Bible with its insertion of words such as “bishop” and “deacon” notwithstanding).
Christianity was back to the good-old bad-old days of the Pharisees complete with their violent, genocidal and exclusivist Old Testament. The New Testament was assembled using the four main Gospels and the writings of Paul, largely. Paul, being a Jewish scribe (lawyer), was very familiar with the Books that would later form the Old Testament and was fond of quoting them, thus, tying the two books together. The focus shifted subtly but significantly to include the earthly authority both of government (the Emperor) and the priest class. Books or scriptures that didn't accord with that were left out and were, indeed, rounded up and burnt. Knowing this, it is quite easy to see how Christianity has the dominating and often warlike spirit it has today which is quite at odds with the spirit of Jesus evident in the Gospels. It is also quite easy to see why psychopaths would be attracted to this new religion now; this Roman (Empire) Catholic (Universal) Church.
Just to rub salt into the wound, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) was structured using the hierarchical model of the Roman army and Roman bureaucracies. So the RCC has brought down to us through the so called Dark and Middle Ages, not only the spirit of the Roman Empire with its obsession with centralism and power (empire) but also the mechanism to manifest it, the hierarchy. All breakaway denominations have taken with them this same attitude and structure.
I mentioned before that Constantine had two problems. The second one was that he had a lot of Christian soldiers in the ranks who were there for economic reasons and who weren't too keen on killing. He would soon be also facing a significant battle against his rival, Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome and would be outnumbered. Fortunately, Constantine saw a sign in the sky. It was a cross and he heard Jesus say to him, “With this sign, go forth and conquer”. Lucky for Constantine, Jesus, upon re-entering heaven from earth had apparently done a 180 degree rethink on his policy of non-violence and decided war and killing were good things (provided you are a Christian, presumably). Also fortunately, the priests were on board now and could endorse this new policy and they had authority because being priests, they could talk with God; an ability the punters in the pews had suddenly lost. The short of it all was that we now had the phenomenon (indeed, the oxymoron) of the Christian Soldier gleefully killing for Jesus.
They won, by the way, which proved that Constantine was a godly man and saw and heard correctly. Either that or that he was one cunning SOB. History tends to the latter interpretation. Little wonder, then, that the Pope had his own army in later years and waged his own wars. Little wonder also that Popes and other churches' leaders have not stopped wars by simply reminding their adherents that they are not supposed to go and kill people and instead, you know, love your enemies. The RCC cannot come out in opposition to wars because they fear being seen as partisan politically. The only way not to be seen as such and to still oppose wars would be to do so in principle. But it cannot do that because fighting wars for God is part of its foundation myth. Other churches cannot do so either because they borrow the RCC history to trace themselves back to Christ. Which is ironic because the RCC cannot trace itself back to Christ in the way it claims, anyway. It claims that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and therefore the first Pope. He was neither. This is a matter of historical record. He wasn't a bishop anywhere, not even in Jerusalem. After Christ's death, James, his brother, became the head of the Christians in Jerusalem.
The Christian faith was co-opted by Constantine and turned into an instrument of power and dominance and given the tools (hierarchy and State authority) to use and abuse. So what's not for a psychopath to love about religion?
Next, the Lawyers. The situation is particularly bad in Common Law countries. Down through the centuries the Law has been shaped by the lawyers. They run it and they run it for their own benefit. If you have enough money, they will get you acquitted. It's that simple. Eighty percent of defendants in serious criminal trials go free in Australia and yet innocent people are found guilty and jailed. The figures vary but estimates of between five and ten percent have been made. It is similar in England and the US, I believe. With privatised prisons, the situation has become a real nightmare. (see here) – over incarceration is inevitable.
Though there is a judge presiding, he doesn't run the case. The lawyers do. The judge is reduced to an umpire. Two lawyers battle it out in front of the jury and the best legal team wins. It has become a sporting contest whereby the best team wins and justice loses. A whole legal hurdy-gurdy has grown up around admissibility of evidence. It gets truly bizarre and is the main reason criminals with deep pockets go free. Truth and Justice are not the issues. Money and style are. And don't forget the judge is a trained lawyer. Judges (lawyers) make case law. Lawyers are over represented in any government and they legislate laws. The lawyers in government are deferred to by non-lawyer politicians, especially in this area. These lawyer/politicians make ambiguous laws and full of loopholes requiring judicial adjudications and lots of appeals. It's good for business. The lawyers control everything from the training institutions in universities to the making of the laws through government and from the Bench, to pimping for the crooks and fleecing you and me. They stifle any reform be it of their own profession or reform in government. It is their very own Sacred (Cash) Cow. They mystify the whole process and create the helplessness which then creates the demand. Too easy!
The Law Profession is at the heart of institutionalised corruption in our society. The legal fraternity will actively discourage a member from following their conscience and insist they follow the letter of the law as written (and interpreted for them) no matter how bizarre the result. By doing so, they institutionalise corruption and advance its cause. Because almost all of the profession is driven by money and the highest bidder, be it in court or in government, this exaggerates class privilege and all the corruption and abuse that goes along with that. It owes no allegiance to truth. It is a cancer.
Police corruption is exacerbated by the lawyers. Because they make it so hard for police to get a conviction, the police are encouraged to fabricate evidence and frame suspects. Pretty soon this becomes routine and necessary for promotion and next comes framing completely innocent victims. Hence the high wrongful incarceration rate.
From Bernard Chazelle at A Tiny Revolution-
In 1998, Judge Keller rejected the request for a new trial for a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA tests after his trial showed that it was not his semen in the victim.
“We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” she later told the television news program “Frontline.” “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important.”
The people in this article from the New York Times have so much wrong with them, I really wouldn't know where to start. But suffice it to say that all the characters had significantly more power than the hapless inmate who lost his life because none of them, despite the excuses and apologetics, in the end cared enough. Power anaesthetises you to others' pain. This situation does not perturb the ultimate controllers in our society (subject of the next institution) because it adds to the pervasive atmosphere of helplessness and arbitrariness which, as we've seen, contributes to triggering obedient behaviour.
At present, the Common Law system rewards people without conscience. It is tailor made for psychopaths.
I have talked about two of the three institutions, religion and law, and one of the mechanisms, the hierarchy. This essay is getting long, so I'll continue with the third institution that has grown up around the “Moneylenders” and the second of the mechanisms, compound interest, in a further installment.
‘Blow Up’ Over-the-Counter Contracts ?
Sun, 03/08/2009 - 20:15 — Don SmithScholes Advises ‘Blow Up’ Over-the-Counter Contracts (Update2)
By Christine Harper
March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Myron Scholes, the Nobel prize- winning economist who helped invent a model for pricing options, said regulators need to “blow up or burn” over-the-counter derivative trading markets to help solve the financial crisis.
The markets have stopped functioning and are failing to provide pricing signals, Scholes, 67, said today at a panel discussion at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Participants need a way to exit transactions and get a “fresh start,” he said.
The “solution is really to blow up or burn the OTC market, the CDSs and swaps and structured products, and let us start over,” he said, referring to credit-default swaps and other complex securities that are traded off exchanges. “One way to do that, through the auspices of regulators or the banking commissioners, is to try to close all contracts at mid-market prices.”
Scholes also recommended moving the trading of credit- default swaps, asset-backed securities and mortgage-backed securities to exchanges to allow for “a correct repricing” of the assets. The securities are currently traded between banks and investors, without any price disclosure on exchanges.
CME, LTCM
Scholes served almost eight years on the board of CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures market, until his term expired in May, said Allan Schoenberg, a CME spokesman. CME operates the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade and New York Mercantile Exchange. He was a partner in Long-Term Capital Management LP, the hedge fund whose $4 billion loss in 1998 set off a near-panic in financial markets and prompted the Federal Reserve to orchestrate a bailout by 14 lenders.
A total of $531 trillion in outstanding derivatives contracts traded over-the-counter as of June, according to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. They were mostly interest-rate swaps, but also included CDS and equity derivatives.
“Take the pricing mechanism from the desks in banks, which have made a huge amount of profits over the last number of years, and facilitate price discovery,” Scholes said.
Comments Are ‘Misguided’
Scholes’ comments generated opposition from the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the industry group that sets trading standards for the over-the-counter derivatives market. ISDA has more than 800 members, including dealers and funds that trade in the market.
“Whatever your views on derivatives or credit-default swaps and the financial crisis, the notion that you would, as he said, blow up, the business in that way is just misguided,” said Robert Pickel, chief executive officer of ISDA. “I don’t know what people are thinking when they say those kinds of things.”
Scholes won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1997 along with Fischer Black and Robert Merton for their Black-Scholes model of pricing options, contracts that give the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to purchase a security or commodity at a later date for a specified price.
He is now chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management LP in Rye Brook, New York. The hedge fund was forced in November to freeze investor withdrawals after a surge in redemptions.
Among other recommendations, Scholes urged changes to the accounting rules to give better disclosure on risks, said that banks should focus on their return on assets instead of return on equity, and said central bankers shouldn’t try to quell market volatility, which provides a natural brake on risk- taking.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Christine Harper in New York at
charper@bloomberg.net.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aBDLzTYzuxl0&refer=home
My Space blocks traffic to WinterPatriot
Sun, 03/08/2009 - 14:56 — newjesustimesI put a link from a myspace profile to winterpatriot.blogspot.com and got to a page with the following information:
The link you are trying to visit has been disabled.
You have reached a link that is no longer in service. That means the link was very naughty, and, much like head lice, had to be eliminated before it spread.
You may be asking yourself, 'Hey, what was it about that link that got it in trouble?' An excellent question! Usually, it's one of the following reasons:
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The link was spam! No one likes spammers, and we don't like their links.
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You almost got phished! There are people out there who want to steal your MySpace password. They want to log in as you and send spam, harass your friends, change your profile, and generally run amok. Phishing pages are usually designed to look like MySpace to trick you. Other sites may also ask for your MySpace login information to customize your profile, insert videos or slide shows, track visitors, or any number of other things.Don't make it easy for them. ONLY USE YOUR MYSPACE LOGIN INFO ON
WWW.MYSPACE.COM!!
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Viruses are not fun! Neither is adware, spyware, or malware. We cut the links to places that are known sources of infection.
If you really did want to check out some spam, viruses, or phishing pages, we're really sorry to have interrupted. We're sure you can find it elsewhere. There's plenty on the Internet
Zeev Maoz - The Building Blocks of Israel's National Security Policy
Sat, 03/07/2009 - 17:02 — littlehornI typed this for 2 hours, reading from Maoz's book, Defending the Holy Land, which is recommended by Finkelstein. I have barely finished reading the introduction. I have two other books I'm reading at the same time, and I'd rather put that one off for a little while.
From what I've read until now, it seems Maoz is a Zionist who criticizes Israel's security policies as foolish. Nothing too new you might say and I agree. Yet, he is a specialist and a critic. So the rest of the book might just be enlightening. It seeks to demonstrate each major war engaged in by Israel was not necessary at all; certainly a grand departure from the usual propaganda about bad Arabs.
I thought this one passage was interesting, because it encapsulates the Zionist security principles pretty well. Criticism finally appears in the last paragraph, but leaves the reader unsatisfied, as it is obviously substantiated in the meat of the book. Malheureusement, I have a life to attend to, and can only think of typing the whole book in my worst nightmares.
So here's the second part of the introduction:
The foundations of Israel's national security conceptions were laid down by David Ben-Gurion in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Many Israeli strategists view these doctrinal foundations to be valid at present as well (Ben Israel 2001, 269-71; Tal 2000, vi). Ben-Gurion's ideas not only are widely accepted among the members of the Israeli security community but are widely shared by the Israeli public (Arian 1995, 65-66, 173-86, 254-71). I present these principal ideas and discuss them very briefly here. [3] In subsequent chapters I reexamine many of these ideas in a more critical fashion.
Israel's security policy is based on a set of assumptions about Israel's regional and international environment. These assumptions define the basic threat perception that Israel is said to have experienced over the years.
1. The Arab world is fundamentally hostile toward Israel. It would attempt to destroy the Jewish state given the right chance. The Arabs -- Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, or even more remote peoples such as the Algerians, Libyans, or Iraqis-- have never accepted the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. They might accept it as a (possibly temporary) fact, but they have never internalized the fact that Jews have the right to a national homeland in the Middle East. Therefore, the Arabs harbor a permanent and powerful motivation to annihilate the Jewish state. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is their awareness of the futility of this mission and/or their awareness that the price of such an attempt would be exorbitant. The implication is that Israel is destined to live for a long time under an existential threat. In the short term (the short term being the foreseeable future) its policies and actions can only affect the Arab cost-benefit calculus; they cannot affect Arab motivation. In the long run this motivation may change, but this is not certain, and the long run may be very long indeed.
2. Fundamental asymmetries exist between Israel and the Arab world. Israel is dependent on the outside world to survive economically and militarily. As an advanced society, it also requires ties with the outside -- mostly Western -- world for cultural, educational, and social purposes. Israel is also dependent on the world because, up to the early 1990s, most of the Jewish population resided outside of Israel. Its spiritual, social, and economic ties to the Jewish community are an essential component of the Israeli national identity. Israel is also dependent on the outside world for weapons. At the same time, Israel cannot rely on the outside world to ensure its survival and defense. Ultimately, Israeli men and women will have to risk their lives to defend their country. Nobody else will do it for them. Moreover, both the experience of the Holocaust and the short history of the prestate and state periods suggest that the international community is an unreliable source of political and military support. It is at times of dire need that the international community -- even Israel's closest friends and allies -- has consistently disappointed Israel. Israel can ultimately rely only on itself to ensure its survival, not on the pledges of others, no matter how well intentioned they may be. The concept of "a people that dwells alone" is a clear expression of this perception of international isolation.
4. Israel's geography is a major constraint on its ability to fight. The map of Israel (see maps 1.1 and 1.2) shows how small Israel is in relation to its neighbors and how narrow the country's "waist" has been in the area immediately north and east of Tel Aviv -- especially before the occupation of the territories during the Six Day War. This implies that an attack by one or more Arab states could split the country into several slices almost instantly. Moreover, Israel's population centers are within the range of light arms fire and certainly artillery fire of its enemy. A jet plane taking off from Syria, Jordan, and even Egypt can reach Israel's population centers in a matter of minutes. The Israeli civilian and military airfields are within the range of tactical Syrian missiles and a short flight from Egyptian bases in the Sinai and from Jordanian air bases. In the era of complex maneuvering jet fighters, Israel's planes do not have even enough room to circle around over Israeli airspace in order to practice or land in their bases. For Israel, losing territory means risking its very survival.
5. The Iron Wall offers the long-term hope for the Jewish state. The concept of an "Iron Wall," developed in Zeev Jabotinsky's famous articles of 1923, represents a vision that entails both short-term hardships and a long-term ray of hope. This concept was implicitly adopted by Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky's great political rival (Shlaim 2000, 19). The Iron Wall theme suggests that Israel has a number of things working for it in the long run: its staying power, the military blows it hands the Arabs every time they try to attack it, and the development of a model society that outperforms Arab societies. All these factors, along with Israel's viability and prosperity as a democratic and advanced society, will work to convince the Arabs of the futility and the illogic of their dreams. over time, the Arabs will come to accept the Jewish state and to make peace with it. initially, this would be a peace of realists, that is, a peace of acceptance but not reconciliation. As this peace bears fruit, the Arabs will realize that they stand to benefit far more from peaceful and open relations with the Jewish state than from conflict or boycott. When that happens, reconciliation would follow. It is impossible to develop a long-term national vision on the basis of this bleak reality. Why should Jews come to settle in Israel so that they or their children would be driven into the sea by a mass of Arabs bent on genocide and politicide, while the international community stands idly by ? Even the most optimistic scenario suggests that Israel would have to live by its sword for a very long time-- perhaps several generations. The Zionist leaders had to provide a ray of hope in that vision. The concept of the Iron Wall provides this long-term optimistic vision and the rationale for Israeli resilience and staying power despite the lack of a short-term relief.
As noted, these assumptions remained largely stable over time. Some of the more operational contours of these assumptions may have undergone changes in different periods. For example, the scope of the threat had originally been limited to the Arab world. States such as Iran and Turkey were excluded from the circle of enemies for a long time because they were not considered "Arab." Turkey's status has remained unchanged in this respect. Iran, however, has become one of the most potent enemies of Israel since the 1990s due to the fundamental hostility of the Islamic regime in Tehran, its long-range missiles, and its nuclear program. The economic threat--especially that element based on Arab oil resources-- became much more prominent in the list of resources that could be mobilized against Israel after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Finally the key fear of Israeli leaders in the 1950s and 1960s was of an all-out attack by a mass of Arab armies. This danger may have diminished somewhat, but it is still a significant threat. However, the new concern that takes up much of the time of the Israeli security community is the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) --especially nuclear weapons-- by one or more of Israel's enemies. So there is an added technological threat that has become an important element in Israel's list of nightmares.
The basic tenets of Israel's security doctrine that emerge from these assumptions reflect a set of ideas concerning the general principles for dealing with these threats and structural constraints over the long haul. These tenets are not listed in any particular order, as there is no clear hierarchy among them.
1. The principle of qualitative edge. Israel must rely on a large margin of qualitative advantage to offset the quantitative advantages of the Arab states. The strength of the Jewish state lies in the quality of its manpower, in its technological and educational capability, and in the social cohesion and motivation of its population. This qualitative edge is expressed in both military and nonmilitary terms. In military terms it is translated to hardware and software. Israel must be able to develop and/or acquire the more modern and capable weapons systems than the Arabs. The quality of manpower ensures that Israeli pilots, sailors, tank crews, artillery gunners, and even infantry and special operations soldiers outperform their Arab counterparts by a wide margin. Even when the weapons systems are evenly matched in terms of their technical specifications, the difference in manpower quality ensures that the Israelis should always have better soldiers than the Arabs. The same applies to military generalship; to tactical command quality; and, of course, to the synergy among weapons systems, support systems (e.g., logistics, communication, intelligence), people, and mission. In terms of nonmilitary elements of power, Israeli society should be able to provide the armed forces with cohesive and high-quality human, economic, social and political reserves. This would enable the military along the borders to operate free of concerns as to what is going on at the home front. Therefore, national leaders should seek--to the extent possible-- to pursue policies that rely on a high degree of public support in matters of national security. This implies, among other things, opting to go to war only under circumstances of no choice. Purely aggressive wars may erode public support for national security policies and thus reduce the willingness of Israeli society to contribute to a long-term national security stand necessary to sustain the Iron Wall in the long run.
2. A nation at arms. Israeli society must be fully mobilizable in times of crisis and ready and willing to extract all of its resources for the struggle for survival. At the same time, Israel should be able to provide its people with welfare, freedoms, and basic rights akin to that of any advanced democratic society. Israeli society must be able to function as a "normal" society during times of relative peace in order to be a true haven for the Jews around the world. Since the transition from peace to war may be very quick, the society must be able to transform itself quickly into a fully mobilized entity. This dictates a large conscript military force as well as a substantial reserve component that is well trained and equipped and that can be mobilized quickly.
3. The principle of strategic defensive and operational offensive. Israel's political and strategic posture is status quo-oriented; yet its operational doctrine is offensive. At any given point in its history, Israel's decision makers accepted the territorial status quo. Therefore they always claimed that Israel had no territorial ambitions. Nevertheless, for the reasons discussed later, Israeli political leaders believed that Israel could not afford to fight defensive wars. The preference for an offensive strategy was never due to proactive political ambitions; it was an outgrowth of structural constraints. Some of these constraints are listed subsequently.
4. The principle of short wars aimed at quick decision. Israel cannot afford to fight long and drawn-out wars. It has to engage in short and decisive military campaigns. The focus on short wars is dictated by three fundamental constraints.
a. Social and economic constraints. A fully mobilized military force implies bringing Israeli economy and society to a screeching halt. The opponents may wear Israel out not by imposing one massive military strike but rather by overdrawing its human and material resources beyond the breaking point. Also, defensive strategies yield to the enemy the strategic advantage; Israel's enemies can decide when, where, and how to attack. This can tip Israeli society beyond its economic breakpoint due to the need to maintain full mobilization. Short and decisive wars allow Israel to maximize its capabilities, to achieve military decision, and then to release its reserve forces so that its society could continue to function. Israel has to slice up its strategic marathon against the Arab world into a series of one-hundred-meter dashes.
b. Geographic constraints. Israel's small territorial margins, its narrow waist, and the small distance between the border and Israel's population centers prohibit defensive postures. Defending a given territory effectively must allow the defender some room for maneuver within its own lines (Luttwak 2001, 147-57), which Israel does not have. Therefore Israel must rely on an offensive strategy and transfer the fighting to the enemy's territory. This may require a willingness to use a first-strike doctrine and to initiate preventive or preemptive wars. Even when the enemy launches the first strike, Israel must strive to seize the strategic initiative by moving to an offensive and into the enemy's territory as quickly as possible.
c. International constraints. The international community is likely to intervene quickly and decisively in order to bring an end to the fighting. If Israel wants to reach a military decision in the war for purposes of cumulative deterrence (see later discussion), it must do so before the international community imposes on the combatants a cease-fire or even a political agreement. Israel's tenuous international standing requires it to be in a position of military and territorial strength at the start of negotiations. Thus, Israel must be the one to determine the scope, speed, and nature of the war through its own actions.
5.The principle of major power support for war. Israel must ensure the explicit or tacit support of at least one major power before going to war. In the past, Israel's leaders had to deal with the duality in their perception of the international community. On the one hand, they recognized the basic dependence on the outside world for both material and diplomatic support. On the other hand, they were utterly suspicious of the willingness and ability of the international community to support Israel during severe existential crises. The resolution of this seeming contradiction was typically framed in the previous maxim. THe support of a major power would ensure that Israel would, at the very least, receive enough weapons and munitions to replenish those expended or destroyed during the war. Major power support is also instrumental for fending off diplomatic attacks and sanctions through the UN security Council, but this is seen as secondary to ensuring a constant source of weapons supply. The implication of this principle is that Israel should try to avoid or delay wars for which it cannot secure the support of a major power.
6. Autonomy of action before alliance. Israel should prefer independence of action over binding alliances that might limit its freedom of action. The pursuit of allies to bolster Israel's security has always been an important desire of Israel's leaders. In practice, however, Israel has never faced a practical dilemma where its leaders had to choose between an offset of a formal defense treaty with another state and a prospect of losing its autonomy to act when, where, and how it seemed fit. Nevertheless, the hypothetical possibility was often discussed in policy circles. The prevailing view has always been that Israel is better off keeping informal ties and defense cooperation with other nations rather than signing a binding alliance treaty. Israeli policymakers generally considered the liabilities of a defense pact-- the constraints it would impose on Israel's freedom of action and the questionable reliability of even the friendlies state-- to outweigh the benefits of such an alliance. A defense pact would contradict the other elements of Israel's security conception. Thus, Israel is seen to be better off without such an alliance than with it.
7. The principle of cumulative deterrence. Israel's long-term security doctrine rests on three principles: cumulative deterrence, limited military decision, and excessive us eof force in both limited conflict settings and general wars. Israel cannot impose on the Arabs a peace through a massive and total military victory (Kober 1995); it can only hope to persuade the Arabs to accept peace due to their war weariness. The Arab states must come to understand that they cannot destroy Israel and that the price of continued conflict is more than they can bear. This implies that Israel has to brace for a protracted conflict punctuated by a--possibly large-- number of short wars and limited encounters. The principle by which Israel can hope to convert over time the Arab motivation to continue the conflict into a readiness to make real peace with it is the concept of cumulative deterrence (Almog 2004, 1995; Bar Joseph 1998). Cumulative deterrence means successive and effective uses of force in both limited and massive military encounters. Such successful demonstrations of force are designed to convince the opponent of the futility of military force in the long term. Cumulative deterrence assumes frequent failures of both general and specific deterrence.
Whenever the more "conventional" forms of deterrence fails, Israel must launch a decisive military operation taht would bring about a relatively unambiguous military decision within a short time frame. In the cases of more limited challenges of low-intensity conflict (LIC) or limited military engagement, Israel should be able to dominate the process of escalation and maintain the strategic initiative, so as to bring the opponent to the point of exhaustion and defeat. The accumulation of what Almog (2004, 6) calls "assets in a victory bank" would serve to persuade the Arabs that they cannot win. As Lieberman (1995, 63) puts it: "Short-term deterrence failures may be a necessary condition for long-term deterrence success."
8. The Samson Option. This principle concerns ambiguous nuclear deterrence in situations of last resort. If conventional deterrence fails and Israel finds itself in a situation wherein it might be defeated in a major military confrontation, or if the Arabs engage in actions that threaten the very survival of Israel (e.g., use WMDs against population centers or basic infrastructures), Israel threatens to use its nuclear weapons. This threat is ambiguous, however, because Israel has never openly admitted to possession of nuclear weapons. The conception that Israel has sought to convey--through veiled threats and signals of various kinds-- is that its nuclear weapons serve as an ultimate insurance policy designed to deter the annihilation of the state by massive force. Hersh's (1991) term--the Samson Option--is an apt characterization of the role of nuclear deterrence in Israel's security policy.
9.Settlements as determinant of borders. Israeli settlements will determine Israel's final boundaries. This tenet does not appear in the standard list of the basic tenets of Israel's security conception. it has become, however, a connerstone of Israeli security conception both before the occupation of Arab territories in the Six Day War and even more so since 1967. Even before 1948, the leading Zionist leaders strongly believed that the outcome of any political settlement in Palestine would be determined by the demographic distribution of the ethnic groups residing in it. The drive to bring in Jewish immigrants and settle them in distant areas in an effort to form Jewish population centers in all parts of Palestine was due not only to the vision of Palestine as a Jewish homeland but also to the wish to affect the boundaries of the Jewish state. Settlements form a human and physical fait accompli. THey show the determination of a nation to hold on to a given territory and signal to both friends and foes that they will be defended by force. Thus, settlements were always seen as a pillar of national security.
Taken together, these nine tenets form a fairly coherent and stable national security conception. This conception was never published in an official document (and even when there was an attempt to frame it in terms of an official policy it was never approved by the cabinet or the presiding defense minister at the time; see chap. 11). Yet, there is enough official, semiofficial, and scholarly writing to suggest that this is the doctrine Israel has been using all along. The principal aims of this conception is to enable Israel to overcome the need to cope with fundamental threats to its survival on the one hand and to develop as a "normal"society that will attract Jews from all over the world on the other hand.
Both the assumptions on which this doctrine rests and the principles of which the doctrine is composed are part of a belief system shared by politicians, experts, and laypersons. However, they are neither valid as a description of objective reality nor accurate characterizations of Israel's actual behavior. In fact, I will show throughout this book that many the foundational assumptions of these conceptions have been fairly removed from reality. I will also show that in many cases Israel violated its own doctrinal principles. In other cases, the rigidity of these doctrinal canons has been detrimental to Israel's security and welfare; some of these principles may well have undermined Israel's ability to make peace with its neighbors. At this point, however, my intent is to present the elements of Israel's security-related belief system as shared by most Israelis. This belief system serves as the basis for the evaluation of Israel's policies in the coming chapters.
Like totally bff, Zippy and Condi Clinton
Thu, 03/05/2009 - 21:32 — McJJuan Cole informs us that Clinton is in for a mess of critical emails from far rightwing Revisionist-Zionists because she 'slammed Israel' on their planned demolition of 88 Palestinian houses in Jerusalem. She said, "Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road-map'... It is an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the government at the municipal level in Jerusalem."
Well, I'd hardly call it 'slamming', more like whimpering, but then any sliver of a hope for that promised change we've heard so much about is a good reason for us to "[send] her a supportive message for daring to speak out on the issue." Right? 
What she didn't dare to speak out on was Israeli's atrocious actions in Gaza. In fact, she didn't even bother to go there. I think it was because she was totally excited to see her bff Zippy. Check it out - what do you think?
Warring World(s) Part 3. Understanding the Victims
Tue, 03/03/2009 - 21:27 — jamesPrevious Part 2 here
Part 3. UNDERSTANDING the VICTIMS (that's you and me)
This is a big one, folks. There's a lot of links and a couple of exercises to do. Should keep you off the streets for a while! Sorry about the length but there is a lot of ground to cover and I don't think I could make it any shorter and do it any sort of justice. Take your time, particularly if this stuff is new to you. It will be unsettling. Be warned, I am trying to turn your view of your world upside-down or perhaps right-side-up! So let's into it-
Our psychopathic leaders and opinion shapers like to blame us for all the damage to the world and for the state that it is in, which is nice given that they are in control and we are not; that the actions that are popularly supported are never included in the managed “two-party” debate that substitutes for choice and voter control. Never-the-less, they are right in one sense. We may be being lied to and we may realise this to varying degrees but we go along with it. Why? This is what I hope to answer, at least in part, in the following essay. Once we understand what the problem is in our society and in ourselves and who is really causing it and why, we are halfway to the solution.
If you have grown up in any “civilised” society, i.e. non-tribal, that I can think of, you will suffer from two related afflictions caused by the preceding generation watering the seed that lies within them and, indeed, within us all. This seed, the desire for power over things we simply are not given power over, principally other people, leads to damaging consequences and psychopathy in some. The two afflictions affecting us all to varying degrees are Learned Obedience and Learned Helplessness. Both lead to a restricted life through a very stunted view of our own autonomy and to a very distorted view of God, if you happen to be spiritually minded.
For my understanding of Learned Obedience, I am greatly indebted to Alice Miller . . (and here) for her writings which have so illuminated my understanding of the human condition as we find it today. While there was much I was aware of before I came to her books, it was Miller's words that lined all the ducks up in a row, so to speak, and gave them a context. A context that showed the dynamic relationship between the desire to love and be loved, the desire to please and to physically survive in the child on the one hand together with the parents' and authorities' desire for control out of their own insecurities, on the other hand, in a way that came alive for me.
I am also greatly indebted to Arthur Silber for not only introducing me to Miller's books through his own writings but also for expounding them and emphasising the need for acceptance and belonging that bedevils us all and makes tools and fools of us so much of the time. I can thoroughly recommend Arthur's Tribalism series and his essays on Alice Miller's work. You might also consider reading these two very valusable essays here and here
(If you read his essays and find them valuable, please consider supporting him and his writing via the Paypal botton on his site!).
This insistence on unthinking, unquestioning obedience by all those in authority over us as children causes untold damage not only at the time but also later throughout our lives and all too often into the next generation. The damage and methods are elegantly explained by Arthur Silber so I wont repeat them here. But suffice it to say that we are blamed and shamed into thinking that we are defective human beings and can only win back acceptance and acceptability and avoid physical and emotional pain through dutifully following orders. This mental conditioning not only sets us up to be manipulated later by authority figures and con artists (which will necessarily have a large proportion of psychopaths amongst them) but will also colour how we view our fellow human beings both within our own tribe (us) and those outside (them). What is ironic is that our psychopathic leaders are always presenting themselves as part of “us” when, in fact, they constitute the entirety of “them”. The people we have been taught to see as “them” are really part of “us”. This is the mother of all “bait and switch” scams. This is the fundamental misperception held by people in our society that leads to wars, exploitation and an untold amount of generalised, non-specific fear that permeates our lives. It's the psychopaths in every society against the rest of us. We accept an enormous amount of restriction in exchange for perceived safety from perceived dangers and enemies all enumerated by our “betters” and “authorities” who are most often psychopathic but always exploitative. We do it reflexively and on demand now.
If you want to know how much you do this (and scare everyone else around you), spend one whole day saying “no” to every “request”, “suggestion” and direction. See if you don't cause some problems for all involved! I'm serious. Try it (that's an order!).
“Just say no” and don't explain it. You don't have to explain yourself. You don't need their permission to say “no”. You're autonomous, remember. (OK, it might not be prudent if you work in an hierarchy to tell your “superior” no. But you might consider asking why. Do a little questioning. Push back. Push the norms.)
If you have a reflex to explain yourself, it will go back to this following orders conditioning and the attendent notion that it is what “good” people do. And being “good” is a moral injunction and morals are to do with God (supposedly). So when you say “no” and refuse to explain it, a little person inside you is going to get scared because you are rebelling against God and everybody knows that God will get you for doing that. Either that or Santa won't bring you anything at Christmas (depending on your particular upbringing). I'm being a little flippant here but most people will find there is validity in what I say if they observe their own feelings when not complying with others. This inbuilt monitor will inhibit our freedom both in what we don't do for ourselves and in what we comply with which often further restricts us.
If anyone thinks it is right to comply with the wishes of those who presume authority over us and that to rebel against them is to rebel against God's order, then they can explain to me why God gave us all freewill. Patriarchal Christians are fond of quoting Romans 13:1-2 saying that God ordains all governments and authorities.
(Romans 13:1-2 NKJV – “Let every soul be subjected to the governing authorities. For there is not authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.
Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God and those that resist will bring judgement on themselves”).
Not only does this offend common sense (think various Georges) but it is a very wrong translation of the original Greek scripture. “Governing Authorities” in the NKJV translation and others has been extrapolated from the words “higher powers” (presumably to sound like “powers that be”) and "power" which is one interpretation of the Greek word “exousia” used in the original. But even then it is a partial translation because to be correct it should read “power to choose”. The word “exousia” is elsewhere in the New Testament (and by the same author, Paul) translated as “liberty” and “freedom to choose”. So this should read that the authority is from God to ourselves over ourselves and only over ourselves To assume authority over others is to invite God's judgement on us.
This now makes sense of God giving us freewill for without it we can't be ultimately accountable nor can we freely choose God's Way. Without freewill, there is no way we could be described as being “made in the likeness of God”. We would be little better than robots. Having authority over ourselves rather than by our governments is also in accordance with Jesus saying that Satan is the ruler of this world. Now if this is so, whom is he going to rule through? Well, those with power over others. This is the reverse of what we have been taught by our “Authorities” and you can readily see why. And we know what having power over others does to the human mind. Power corrupts, period. We have a bit more internal consistency now. Have you ever wondered why a king would commission an “Authorized” version of the Bible?
I could go on further with supporting quotes from the New Testament but I don't want to turn this into a theology lecture. I also don't want to restrict this to Christians, so called or otherwise. I mention the New and Old Testaments as much as I do because they are extremely influential over our thinking (even over those whom have never read it!) whether we realise it or not. They have been used (misused) to give authority to the leaders and remove it from the led of this predatory western culture with its long and bloody history of exploitation. This is particularly true today in America and Israel. Our world view is largely a product of our culture so these two books are extremely relevant to our discussion, I believe.
Let us now consider Learned Helplessness. I think it would be fair to say that most people have considered the fact that they would not survive for long outside our society i.e. “in the wild”. We are fond of describing self sufficient tribal people as “primitive” which is code for “stupid”. Yet, they are masters of their own lives in their physical environment. We, in comparison are helpless, totally helpless and we know it. This is what a specialised society does to you. It makes you dependent on the organisers, the go-betweens, the controllers, the psychopaths that control our food distribution and our energy supplies to mention just two areas. (When this same process is foisted on whole nations it is called Globalism.) How are you feeling? Secure? This is relatively real helplessness. What is more troubling ironically, I believe, is the unreal helplessness; the stuff that doesn't exist in the real world; the stuff that has been programmed into our brains to make us feel helpless and hopeless over things that are very much under our control, or could be.
Learned Helplessness is far more insidious in its implantation and its outcome than Learned Obedience which is taught through constant application of “Do this or Else” (to quote Silber). Helplessness comes from conditioning that impresses on you that you are powerless over your circumstances; that no matter what you do or decide it will not work or will not be right, whatever that is. The object is for you to give up your autonomy, your freewill and follow whatever you are told as in Learned Obedience. But you are much more likely to do so willingly because you will believe you need help. So, if the prison door is left open, you will stay because you wont believe you will survive “out there”. You become your own jailer. It doesn't always work, of course. This is what the Israelis are attempting to do to the Palestinians and have been for many years but it is not working as evidenced by the tunnels for smuggling past the prison walls and the skyrockets they are firing over the prison walls. This is what is infuriating the Israelis and this is what I suspect is the meaning of the skyrockets to the Palestinians (at least to those firing them).
But it is very hard to resist the programming when you are young and there is no one to encourage you to resist. How is it done, this programming? It is accomplished often unwittingly by parents who push their children to do things they are clearly not ready to try. The child fails and often, of course. This imprints the failure of their efforts into their mind. Our culture encourages us to “throw them in at the deep end”. The parents, of course, are quite used to doing things they are instructed to do without all the information they need; to do better; to “strive for excellence” whether capable or not; mostly not. They have normalised all this and so see nothing wrong with behaving in like manner to their children. This “swimming in the dark” links fear with learning and accomplishing. We, as children, no longer want to learn or if we do we are constantly battling fear which makes everything that much harder. In Australian Aboriginal culture, the child is free to watch the adult do something for as long as it likes and the child chooses when it will attempt the task for itself, if at all. There is no pressure. The child is respected and granted freedom and autonomy. Certainly in this regard, at least. This culture was sustainable for thousands and thousands of years and was doing fine until interfered with by Western culture which is a relative infant and is looking for all the world as very unsustainable and is far more worthy of the derisive use of the word “primitive”.
Our culture constantly praises competition. But competition creates one temporary winner and a lot of losers. We are also constantly presented with exceptional athletes and artists as models to emulate. Not much chance of that, speaking for myself! The News is full of stories of disasters or atrocities we can do little about particularly as they never identify the causes. At the end of all this, you may feel like you should apologise for taking up space on earth. Many do.
The next level of Learned Helplessness comes when parents, and subsequently any other “authorities”, act erratically and without explanation (because you are just supposed to obey). With inconsistent behaviour comes confusion for the child. How are you supposed to know what the “right” thing to do is when the “right “ thing is always changing? This is a very common cause of children “acting out”. It is very distressing. Eventually, one way to ease the distress is to simply stop trying to work it out whatever it is and just give up and do what you are told and suffer any consequences. The more erratic and inconsistent the parents' or caregivers' behaviour, the worse it is for the child. This is then repeated and reinforced later in life through the behaviour of police, courts, governments and corporations. How often do you hear, “What can I do? It's just the way it is”!
Addictions in the parents amplify inconsistency immeasurably. Children of alcoholics, for instance, suffer a myriad of problems such as Complex PTSD and Dissociation but also this Learned Helplessness. Drug addiction is at epidemic proportions. It is both an effect and a cause of this pervasive helplessness. It's self fuelling.
Children grow up thinking the world is as it is because of their behaviour. They literally see themselves as the “centre of the universe”. So they attempt (or think they should attempt) to do things to stop the bad consequences of their parents' behaviour. When the behaviour and the consequences don't change they blame themselves and feel helpless. Nothing they do is right, nothing works. And because this stress is attended by pain and fear, and lots of it, it gets ingrained very deeply. (Incidentally, that is what torture is all about). So when later in life some cop or other fearful authority figure who can inflict pain starts ranting and raving, many of us are frozen with fear or behave in a way that will placate the bully. I believe this is one explanation for the reception of silence through to nervous laughter that Bush got after his infamous speech about extrajudicial killings around the world - “Lets just say, they're not a problem any more”!
Or the boss starts yelling at you and in front of your co-workers. What are the chances of you shooting back reflexively, “You fucking insolent prick. How dare you insult me in this outrageous manner. Now go to your office and think about what you have done and don't come out until you are ready to apologise”!
The chances would be pretty close to zero of that happening, I guess. Yet, by my reading of Romans ch13, it would be far closer to what God would have us do than being struck dumb and cowering.
I would like to insert into this now an example of what I believe is learned helplessness from our own recent history and the importance of knowing the truth of history not some alternate history. In 2002 there were popular demonstrations around the world against the then impending invasion of Iraq. The invasion went ahead and demonstrations faded away. People had high hopes but were left feeling helpless after thinking they could make an impact against war. The confusion, I believe, was built on the confusion suffered and internalised from their childhood. It all got triggered again. If you suffer from learned helplessness then it is extremely important to find out the truth of your situation to avoid reinforcement through repetition of failure which is inevitable if your plan is not based on reality. The Vietnam war ended not because of citizen demonstrations as is popularly believed but because the United States Army could no longer fight it. There were widespread mutinies taking place within its ranks. Officers were being killed through “fragging” wholesale. The hierarchy had broken down. This has further lesson for us later on.
I have been listing ways that learned helplessness had affected almost all people. The list takes a decidedly dark turn now. For some children and also some adults the programming is done through brutalisation. Many children are sexually assaulted. The figures are one in three girls before the age of eighteen and one in six boys. That's a quarter of our population. For many the abuse is systematic and prolonged. Sexual abuse leaves the victim feeling helpless because they weren't able to stop it and also to blame, which is the other side of this helpless coin, by again not stopping it. They become their own judge, jury and jailers. This state of mind leaves victims open to, and indeed attracts, further abusers. This is not good for the victims and survivors, of course, but it is also not good for the whole society (though good for the controllers) when you have this high number of citizens battling this level of Learned Helpessness. While this abuse is across the whole spectrum of our society, it is more prevalent in environments where there is patriarchal and domineering control such as in religious and state environments.
From here we go deeper again into the world of torture, terror and mind control sponsored throughout the last few hundred years through to the present day by some religions and governments. Though it only directly affects a small minority, it indirectly affects the whole society by adding to the pervasive sense of fear and helplessness. It corrupts the torturers who are then placed in positions of authority over many people. It is where organised paedophilia, torture, the making of psychopaths, learned obedience and helplessness, World Wars (against the “rest of us”), religions, cults, security agencies and the TeeVee come together (whew!). I am not looking forward to writing about this. So this might be a good point to leave off, I think.
Perhaps before I do finish here, though, I will leave you with one more challenge. Earlier in this Part, I suggested that you practise saying “no” to everybody for a day and to be alert to your own and others' reactions of fear. If you are up for it (but not on the same day!), you can also ask yourself whenever a thought occurs about something you think you know to be true, ”Is this something I have just accepted unthinkingly?” And, ”How do I know, in fact, that this is true?” I think you will be surprised at how little you actually KNOW to be true. It might be worthwhile to carry a notebook and jot down the thoughts when they occur to you for a more lenghty consideration later when you might have the time.
This has all been bad news so far, I'm sorry. But there is some good news coming, I promise! But first, Part 4.
Peace, James.
Warring World(s) Part 2 Understanding the Enemy
Sun, 03/01/2009 - 18:32 — jamesPrevious Part 1 here
Part 2. UNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY
In Part 1 I spoke about the enemy being the psychopaths. The term “psychopath” is outmoded in the psychological and psychiatric communities as a diagnostic term and has been replaced with “sociopath”. I don't use “sociopath” because it doesn't convey the same meaning both popularly and medically. In my reading of psychiatric literature, sociopathy tends to look at behaviour that is obviously antisocial in that it is a rejection of or a disregard for society's laws and mores. It tends not to cover those people who shape society's laws and thinking for their own malevolent interests. “Psychopath”, I think, conveys this generalised malevolence better and so I use it for preference.
Psychopathy is all about power, power over others. Psychopaths make up about five percent of our population and given that they are attracted to power, they end up in our governments and professions such as law, police, medicine, religions, military and media. In short, anywhere there is money, status and power. They have a huge influence in shaping and running our (Western) society. In fact, if psychopaths could design a society, this is pretty much what it would look like! We have a society whereby we all as individuals find ourselves competing with each other in nearly every aspect of our lives. We have a society that is based on hierarchies as the organising principle. Hierarchies are designed to abuse. Hierarchies take power and autonomy away from everyone but the leader. Those at the higher levels are compensated by being given some power over those below but they still lose their autonomy.
It behooves us, then, to understand and identify these malevolent actors. No change of any lasting benefit is going to happen without this knowledge, I believe.
Psychopaths have no conscience or, at least, have irretrievably buried it. They have no feelings of empathy for anyone else on this planet, though they can mimic empathy quite well, but not perfectly. They are incapable of making real friends. They see other people only as resources to be used and they consider it their right to use everyone. All antagonism towards them or non co-operation with them is viewed as unreasonable, even outrageous. They lie and deceive consantly. They see nothing wrong with it for two reasons.
Firstly, they don't really understand the difference between right and wrong, only what's right and wrong for them and that is intimately connected to what they want. They are unable to self-reflect. (I read once that “a psychopath doesn't know who he is. He only knows what he wants”. I think this is very accurate and accords with my regretably extensive personal experience.)
Secondly, they do not understand what “truth” is. That may sound bizarre but it's true (no pun intended!). “Truth” is about what is real, what exists, what is factual. Given a chance, psychopaths behave as if they were God; that they create reality. When they lie, they are creating an alternate reality, they believe. And all too often, for a while, it may appear that they have, provided they can convince enough people, that is (think 911/War on Terror). But reality, Truth, sooner or later makes itself felt. Insanity is being disconnected from reality. In this sense, psychopaths are insane. They are highly functioning, yet insane.
So, because of this reality disconnect, not only will they use and abuse us at every opportunity, they will also lead us and themselves into disaster. Even if you are in the priviledged inner circle, disaster awaits you because you are following someone whose map doesn't reflect reality. It doesn't reflect the truth and while ever you (or a nation) can't see the truth for yourself, not seeing the world as it actually is, you will suffer. Hence, “and the truth will make you free”! (Truer words never spoken. Couldn't resist it, sorry!). I think it is worth while to pause for a moment here to consider, again, the authors and adherents of religious scriptures that call for war and genocide.
The sad part is that because we have all grown up in a society that may as well have been designed by psychopaths, we can't see the truth for all the layers of lies and misconceptions we have been fed since birth and we pass them on unwittingly. And we suffer and we cause suffering. We are like fish who cannot perceive water even though it is all around us. We don't have a point of comparison. We have always been in it. Anyway that's the subject for another part. This part is about understanding the perpertrators rather than the victims. I have been debating with myself whether it is worthwhile discussing how psychopaths get to be the way they are. We'll see. But one thing that is definitely worthwhile discussing before I leave this part is the difference between fighting and war.
Everybody fights but only psychopaths wage war. Fighting is short term “argy-bargy” whether it is a punch-up in the local pub on Saturday night or tribes going on raids and indulging in a little raping and pillaging. But it is short term and the aggressor leaves (albeit with a few slaves, maybe). War is far more serious. It's total. The aggressor does not leave unless he is taking everything of value or has firmly emplaced a comprador class to do its bidding (20th century colonialisim, Israel excepted). There's no possibility of a return stoush next Saturday night. War is designed to destroy a whole culture; to subsume it; to enslave it; to squash the life out of it. To illustrate the difference, The American government waged war on Vietnam but they were, through it, fighting (indirectly) the Russians first and then the Chinese who were supporting North Vietnam. Only Vietnam was at risk of not surviving. Only Vietnam was suffering from war. This has significance further down in the essay. Again, only psychopaths wage war. They are the only ones who have the insatiable need. They are the only ones disconnected enough from reality and from any feelings for fellow human beings to dismiss the appalling consequences for others and even themselves. They are the only ones with no sense of proportion. To slaughter a whole people to have even more money when they couldn't spend in ten lifetimes what they have already. You can only order around a certain number of servants. You can only wear one pair of shoes at a time. (Where are you Imelda?)
Colonialism was war waged by psychopathic European (and American) rulers against indigenous peoples all over the world. The indigenous peoples were defeated often in cases where they needn't have been because they didn't understand that the Europeans meant to exterminate them. They responded to the Europeans as they did to their neighbours when they fought with them and presumed they were just being muscled for a bit of territory, not the whole lot. They made treaties with the Europeans and gave more weight to what they said rather than to what they did. Basic mistake. Psychopaths lie and there is absolutely no advantage or point in making deals with a liar.
These indigenous peoples didn't fight genocidal wars with each other because had one tribe done so it would have found itself fighting all the neighbouring tribes. They would have had to combine to preserve themselves against this people that opted for extermination. They didn't realise that the European invader was waging war on them and that they would have to respond accordingly to survive (or perhaps they were just hoping against the evidence, as happens all too often). Had they done so they would have combined to fight together. The North American Indians eventually did this but by then it was too late. If they had combined much earlier, they would likely have prevailed. This is why the Europeans, then the Americans and now the Israelis place so much effort into setting one tribe or faction against another and the central role of false flag attacks in facilitating this. They do this same thing but on a psychological level with their own domestic populations (911/London/Madrid notwithstanding) and for the same reason. Because if we could see them for what they are and combine we could easily throw them out.
This has a direct implication for the coming war against Iran. When Bush (or more correctly, his puppet masters) declared war on Afghanistan and then Iraq, to those that could see, he was actually declaring war on the whole planet. If Russia and China can see this, that they are next, that the people behind US/UK/Israel aim to be the world's masters, then you can expect them to attack with full force the moment Iran is bombed. They will see that their survival is at stake and that moment will be their best chance. If that is what they are planning, then I would expect them to remain relatively quiet and not be issuing belicose warnings to the US/Israel so as to maximise the surprise factor when they do attack in response. And that is, indeed, how it is playing out. I would also expect that Russia and China would see that these wouldbe world masters are disconnected from reality and would therefore promote similarly disconnected types into positions of power and would be nowhere near as formidable as they present themselves to be. Recent exampes of this incompetence and hubris are Lebanon 2006 and Georgia 2008.
Up till now, the US and the UK have been playing “argy-bargy” with Russia and China through so called proxy wars such as Vietnam. These were about markets and political influence. They weren't about survival. At least, not for Russia and China or the US. But all that has changed with the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq. This is about access to oil and strategic positioning for “First Strike” capability. This is about survival. And both Russia and China are very experienced at surviving.
So the psychopaths in and behind the US/UK/Israel governments are leading us all off the cliff thinking they will be all right because they can fly. Reality is about to teach them (and everybody else) a hard lesson.
This may seem an overly pessimistic conclusion to some but when the stakes are high and the downside is great, it is prudent to be pessimistic rather than optimistic. Besides it accords with reality. And the reality is that psychopaths are driven on their destructive paths and they never change. Hoping they will have a change of heart is worse than a waste of time. Negotiating with them is similarly pointless. They will never understand our point of view, our world view. Their condition is irreversible. This makes their motives and goals (our exploitation if not destruction) and to some extent, their methods (fear, threats and violence) very predictable. Certainly, if a strategy has worked for them in the past, they will repeat it.
Actually, there are three basic strategies that are used. First they try the charming lies routine. Then if this doesn't get them what they want, they use threats and violence. And finally if overcome by the victim or confronted by others, they play the victim. This holds true for both governments such as Israel and for individuals such as your average wifebeater and/or child abuser. The constant throughout is lying.
The only effective strategy is to accept that they are as they are (liars and destroyers) and to deal with them. I'll get to dealing with them after the next part, Understanding the Victims (that's you and me).