"Only the dead have seen the end of war"

“Only the dead have seen the end of war”

War itself invades us every day

At home, at work and, yes, at play

We cannot escape while we have breath

Indeed, it stalks us until death

And worse, we paint a moral face

On architects and stars of war

As though killing offers grace

To reach salvation ever more

CEOs and generals support the cause

While cash and fame await

But blithely fail to mention flaws

That leave lesser folks a fate

Of separation, pain and gore

From wars to come and those before

The quote above is attributed to Plato, George Santayana and sometimes to General Douglas MacArthur (who in turn claimed that Plato was his source). Our governments and our leaders claim to seek peace, but the body of work supporting peace is miniscule compared to the bodies that litter the history of war.  With key people on this earth demanding war, how will we ever see its end? Even recent history seems to place war on the highest level of human achievement, while relegating peace to rhetoric and dreamers.  I want to examine some of the mythology of peace while we also review our process for going to war and our penchant for self-deception.  We currently are in international talks to guide Iran away from nuclear weapons through negotiation, but if you were to examine the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, it seems clear that to our Congress as well as to the PM, the overwhelming favorite policy is to threaten Iran with force and that negotiation equals appeasement.  Only the disaster of war can prevent the disaster of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran?  Recall that Netanyahu was a strong cheerleader for Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  He declared unequivocally (2002) that Iraq was building nuclear weapons under Saddam Hussein. That clearly endorsed the phony intelligence foisted on us by the Bush administration.  Why should we believe him now?  He seems to have no additional information.

Meanwhile, war drums today beat for further military intrusion in Iraq, Syria and Libya and on.  We seem to have forgotten that the 2003 invasion of Iraq created the instability that gave rise to al Qaeda of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had previously blocked.  AQ has now morphed into ISIS/ISIL bent on death and retribution, and now the cry for more “boots on the ground.”  Iraq was not a perfect law abiding nation prior to our invasion, but 80s history is that special envoy Donald Rumsfeld was instrumental in the sale of chemical weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein during the 80s under both Reagan and GHW Bush.  We didn’t sell the weapons we wanted .  We sold the weapons we had, to paraphrase Rumsfeld. Were those sales for some humanitarian purpose?  Didn’t Bush in 2003 cite chemical weapons as a reason to invade Iraq?  Hmm?  In the 20 years between our providing chemical weapons to Iraq and our invasion in 2003 seeking weapons of mass destruction, had there been some major change in Iraq that required our invasion?  Maybe our Attention Deficit Disorder?  Despite Cheney’s intelligence the answer is no.  We simultaneously say we hate war while we deliberately promote it.  Is it ironic that our avowed enemy, Iran, does have boots on the ground fighting Isis?  Maybe we should thank them just as they should thank us for destroying Sunnis in Iraq and making Iran and Shia preeminent there.

My introductory verse alludes to two entirely different views of war.  War-makers see war as their calling.  It has been so since before kings.  Most of us see war as inherently ugly, brutal and immoral.  It requires active killing, deprivation of freedom and property, anguish and pain.  War must therefore be uniquely morally justified in order to engage in it or wage it.  “War-makers” (my definition) include those who profit personally from it.  We have had profiteers who supported war for centuries including thousands right here in these United States.  They have been decried from the Revolutionary War onward.  We compare virtually every competitive activity to war.  This may serve as a lesson in itself as to why we tend to accept war as natural and even wholesome.  Football causes thousands of permanent injuries for players from children to professionals, but we seem to enjoy the macho competition while the players literally smash their brains at play.  Football offers a modicum of strategy and tactics; planning and preparation; qualities we ascribe to war.  There are other “supporting rationales” for war that seem more insidious.  We train our soldiers “to kill or be killed,” therefore justifying killing as self-defense.  We speak of far greater evils such as loss of freedom with falling “dominos” that will cause our demise (Vietnam).  We literally demonize our enemies to both stir up anger and energy to defeat an enemy and to reduce the moral questioning within a nation.  Almost laughably, Bush referred to the enemy as “evil-doers.”  Perhaps Pogo was more accurate:  “We have found the enemy and he is us.”  We minimize the human aspects of our enemy to justify killing for wars of choice as well as for wars of vital defense.  They become equal.  Enemies become targets or objects as well as monsters and otherwise inhuman beings and, yet, PTSD thrives.  It is hard to fool soldiers completely.  War veterans are killing themselves at the rate of 22 per day.  Perhaps the stress of “kill or be killed” is more than the human psyche can absorb without serious damage.

There appears to be still another “cover” to justify any war, still harder to accept: the myth that the greater good is served by our “we built that” pride.  We build “smart” bombs and weapons that spare non-combatants as though explosives and munitions had human caring motives when, really, the profit motive of the builders overcomes the conscience of reality.  We only use these weapons as a last resort?  When was the last time that we truly tried anything but war to resolve a conflict?  Even now, many “conservatives” are trying to derail negotiations with Iran.  We provide fame and acclaim to our military leaders who help organize our killing for us, with leaders like the now shamed General Petraeus.  The power bestowed on military leaders is unparalleled in human endeavor.  But is power the solution or the problem or both?  General Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex,” but was woefully optimistic in predicting what happens today when military leaders retire to be lobbyists for military suppliers of arms and advisors who create a revolving door of a political demand push for military spending.  Power/War becomes an economic driver that colors our political and social policies.

Smart bombs, dumb bombs; all cost billions. Is this trip (back to the middle east) necessary?  Let us check your baggage.  Are you going to make money on this war?  Are you pursuing justice, glory or just money?  We created huge new private organizations for logistical support of our combat forces.  This would stun Ike were he alive, but it brought Cheney’s firm billions that were not used to hire many loyal civilian Americans in war zones, but rather thousands of Bangladeshi and other low cost labor that had no loyalty to the US but increased Halliburton profits.   Air Force aircraft that don’t work safely are on the scale of $ 1 billion each, but the political-military-industrial complex buys them with impunity and demands more.  Peace cannot survive in this climate of greed.  Can we?

As a post note, we have seen a recent evolution of language to support insane concepts.  “Conservative” is a case in point.  In my lifetime, a conservative was someone who cared about preserving the environment, saving his/her money and other resources; reserved in social interactions or interfering in another’s life. My father was a conservative.  He was slow to accept checkbooks or sport shirts.  He would be appalled that “conservatives” now abused the planet for personal gain; that denial of facts would be a status symbol or that “conservatives” would start wars for money and lie about it.  Listen to Senators Lindsey Graham or John McCain for war coming to a neighborhood near you.

Peace,

           

George Giacoppe

10 Mar 2015

The Future Cancelled

Not long ago (Jan. 15, 2015) I wrote a blog I called ‘Climate Depression.’ In that piece, I tried to express the truth as I understood it from the writings of Guy McPherson—i.e. that we are already, because of the CO₂our industrial civilization has put in the atmosphere, on a path to the extinction of most life we know and value on this planet. Together with what other scientists have been telling us about the accelerating extinction of species, the expanding poisoning of the soil and the oceans, the destruction of rain forests, and other insults to the web of life—the prospects for the future of life on Earth (the only planet we know of with life at all) seem grim indeed. It is for this reason that Joanna Macy in her recent book World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press: 2007), makes this statement:

The loss of certainty that there will be a future is, I believe, the pivotal psychological reality of our time (p 151).

What Macy is saying is that not just her, not just me, not just scientists who measure it on their instruments, not just a few aware people on this planet, but EVERYONE is feeling the same uncertainty, anger, fear, and grief. We are all assaulted by the grim question—will there even be a future?—at every turn. We see the increasing severity of storms (including winter storms, which are only a more subtle form of the same crisis), the steadily increasing global temperatures (2014 was the warmest year, globally, on record), the steady melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheets and the snows and glaciers in the Andes, the Sierras, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the alarming evidence of methane seeps that could accelerate the whole warming process beyond even our worst fears. We see it, we see reports of it, and we tremble. We grieve. We mourn the loss of a livable planet for our children, our grandchildren, and all those who are scheduled to follow us but who, if the dire predictions prove true, may not follow at all.

            Unlike others, however, Joanna Macy does not stop there. She does not go along with the dominant paradigm which says, ‘just don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, don’t bring everyone down by giving voice to your fear and your despair and your grief.’ No. What Macy says and promotes in her writings and her workshops is precisely the opposite: do give voice to your grief. Do not be ashamed of feeling what you do, for it is natural, adaptive and even healing to do so. Here is how she puts it:

When we mourn the destruction of our biosphere, it is categorically distinct from grief at the prospect of our own personal death.

            Planetary anguish lifts us onto another systemic level where we open to collective experience. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t apologize if you cry for the burning of the Amazon or the Appalachian mountains stripped open for coal. The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time. And it is an adaptive response (152). 

Macy goes on to say that expressing our grief for the planet and for all the beings that our insane behavior of the past 300 years has put at risk of extinction is precisely what we need to be doing at this time. More of us. All of us. This is because the crisis of mass extinction

derives from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of the self. It derives from a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries; that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume; and that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings. (152). 

            If this—that the notion of the separate self is a delusion; that the self is actually more like some interactive process whose boundaries can hardly be named—sounds like something a Buddhist or a spiritual leader (like Pope Francis) would say, that is because it is. Joanna Macy is indeed a practitioner of Buddhism and her take on the crisis of our time is informed by her practice. But it is not just that. She also uses the systems theory of Gregory Bateson to shore up what might be dismissed as spiritual or religious or New Age mumbo jumbo. And what she uses Bateson to confirm is his idea (and many neuroscientists are now reaching similar conclusions) that the conventional notion of the “self” or “consciousness” cannot be reduced, as it normally is, to the “isolated subjectivity of the individual or located within the confines of the skin.” Rather, Bateson says that

“the total self-corrective unit that processes information is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or what is popularly called ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’”….and… “The self as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding.” (153) 

For Macy, of course, this notion of a self-corrective feedback system involving self and other approximately coincides with her main point about the Buddha’s teaching, i.e., that self and world are not separate, arenot individual entities where one or the other is primary; but rather, self and world arise together, or co-dependently (the doctrine is called paticca samuppada: dependent co-arising). They are inextricably intertwined and cannot be separated. Self acts on other just as other acts on self. Mind acts on matter just as matter acts on mind. Neither can exist without the other, nor is one the primary cause of the other (recent news about how the Big Bang may not really be the origin of it all, for there may be no origin, period, tends to fit with these ideas). Once this wisdom is felt or absorbed or seen into, one can no longer contemplate or even countenance doing damage to any other being or entity in the “outside” world, forthere is no outside world. You grieve when you see a mountaintop being removed as much as you do when you observe birds and bees being poisoned by pesticides or helpless children being worked to death in gold mines or polar bears being starved because they can no longer hunt from the sea ice necessary to their being. You grieve because you know via your senses and every other mode of perception that you and they and all the beings of the past and those to come are ineluctably connected; are one web of life in which every part, no matter how small or humble, is necessary and critical to every other part and ultimately to the whole.

            Hence, for Joanna Macy, grieving for what we see and hear is happening to that web of life is not something to avoid, or deny; it is something to embrace, for it is only through facing it, through “being present to and owning our own pain” that we can begin to comprehend how much all our “selves” are intertwined and at risk with all others and, therefore, begin to find ways to change the way the world, in its ‘normal’ operating procedure, does them violence. Whether it will be in time to prevent the global catastrophe that appears to be bearing down upon us is not the point. Or not the only point. The point is to be alive to what is happening, to break open, and from that feeling of being part of that “great net from which one cannot fall,” to derive the courage to stand up to the deadly forces now in charge. 

            This is the healing message that Joanna Macy voices for us. And it is a courageous and healing message that, in the present state of things—with the ever-more-ignorant Sen. James Inhofe throwing snowballs in the Senate chamber to ‘prove’ that global warming is a hoax—is more necessary than ever. Take a look at her book. Give it to those who are young enough to get aroused. And take heart that there are indeed masses of people all around the globe who feel as you do and will, if we are very lucky, wake up before it’s too late and take the selfless (which is just another word for ‘heroic’) actions that are so necessary.

            In this regard, I would also recommend the most recent work of renowned Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (his Stanford Prison Experiment has become the gold standard for investigating what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”), who has embarked on a new path—not investigating what makes ordinary people evil, but rather what it is that makes ordinary people heroic. Though it is not a simple idea or a simple effort, Zimbardo has stated its basic premise quite simply, and it accords with what has been outlined above:

Simply put, then, the key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward.http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_makes_a_hero/ 

That’s it precisely, and is precisely what is needed now to counter the dominant delusion of selfishness, of ‘looking out for number one’ regardless of the consequences to others be they animal, vegetable or mineral. One can only hope that Zimbardo and his colleagues are successful in promoting this paradigm shift among the young. For it is the young, after all, who are going to have the bear the real burden of the failure of the rest of us—our failure to realize what we truly are, our collective failure to act swiftly and courageously enough to rescue what’s left of the only home we have.

Lawrence DiStasi