Tag Archives: peace

Against Obama’s War In Syria

Against War

Count me against an immoral act of war against Syria. A strike against Syria would be an illegal war too.

I’m usually against war of any kind. Strictly speaking, I would endorse my country defending itself against direct attackers.

President Obama and his minions and the pro-war coterie have not made either a moral, or logical, or grown-up case for potentially chewing up innocent Syrian civilians for whatever are the various objectives being promoted. My opinion is admittedly facile, and is intentionally harsh.

I’m just a solitary idealist about peace sitting in the comfort of my home. I sit here in a haven safe from most threats–although I hear the NSA is storing my internet data–and I do understand my Syrian counterparts mostly cannot be sure he or she or their own will make it to tomorrow, alive.

The unintended consequences are not being discussed much. The pro-war argument rests on asserting a “norm” that only is so if the world embraces its enforcement. Otherwise, the norm is a “has been,” and the rationale must logically slide over to the quid-pro-quid arena in which a lot of history’s barbarities have played out.

War…is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer. – Thomas Jefferson

Leave a Comment

Filed under current events

“He must be able to make a choice.”

Trayvon Zimmerman

He chooses Peace. He must be able to make a choice.Interview with Yukiyoshi Takamura in Aikido Journal

In an earlier post about the vigorous development of an anti-Constitution police and surveillance state, I referred to Carl Jung’s insight about the concretization of harmful utility from charged unconscious constellations of collective fears. A simpler way to describe this is to state that if we go looking for evil-doing we will project it on anything our unconscious is on the lookout for; then on, something like, everyone.

The Trayvon Martin tragedy connects with the surveillance state via the consequential vector of a collective unconscious complex. This complex encapsulates the dark side of our collective roots, roots anchored in how it was we created a nation from an American frontier that required the near extermination of the native inhabitants and the kidnapping and enslaving of Black Africans.

This primitive social complex compels our hyper-vigilance, and evokes the solitary vigilante. This vigilante may be found acting as the canary in neighborhood coal mines, or, he or she may be huddled over a computer screen waiting for algorhythmic processing to pop up a ‘suspicious’ character (or propensity,) out of an ocean of indiscriminate data.

This complex is archaic. It’s dark imperative is simple to name: tame the savages one way or the other. Or, as Frederick Turner put it in his book about it, Beyond Geography, its mission is “educating the children for citizenship.”

Among the concomitant terrible issues of this unconscious social complex are willful mistakes in ‘threat’ identification, and, slaughter.

Turner:

The murder of Sitting Bull was what led with terrific inexorability to the savage collusion of this business, for it confirmed the fears of the Sioux Ghost Dancers that the troops had been brought in to murder them all. Badly frightened but defiant Sioux huddled under Chief Bog Foot in the Badlands off the reservations where refugees from Standing Rock came bearing news of the murder. While they danced and awaited further news the troops surrounded them and began a kind of negotiation that ended with the dancers being prodded toward Pine Ridge Reservation December 27, [1880.] On the 28th the troops camped about 20 miles from the agency and plans were made to take from the dancers whatever arms they might have.

You another American dawn, but singular in its way, for what it broke upon was the end of something that vastly predated the corporeal realities of those who now faced each other across a tiny patch of clay-dry Indian soil. On the slopes of the little hillock stood 470 white men muffled and capped against the weather, their rifles greased, glinting, and government-issued, and there four big rapid fire cannons trained downhill. Among them, grim faced, expectant members of the US 7th cavalry–Custer’s outfit–sat their big horses and remembered the Sioux at Little Big Horn. And on the flats below some 340 ghost dancers camped in canvas lodges. The Indians were ordered to surrender their arms. They look at the surrounding guns and into their lodges full of women and children and then delivered up an obviously fallacious cache. So now the close-buttoned, anonymous-faced soldiers moved in, poking and kicking through the lodges while the women called to their men and the children cried. A shaman kept blowing an eagle-bone whistle. Some lodges were overturned and theirs content scattered. The sun rose.

A pitiful treasure of rifles, some of purely talismanic value, was this discovered, but when a soldier attempted to search the body of a young man, the latter drew a concealed gun and fired. In an instant the Indian threat, such as it had been, was exterminated as the gunners and riflemen dropped almost all of the men where they stood at the entrances to the lodges. But now the real battle began, inevitable and terrific. The whole civilization–Chicago and St. Louis and the older outposts eastward; fortresses, soldiers, and slave castles beyond the edges of the Old World; driven kings, commanders, prelators, and nameless spear carriers–all its gathered force poured down the greased barrels and into the screaming women and children who fled westward along winter’s dry gulch toward no refuge. The soldiers pursued them, mile after mile, while behind them a sullen smoke drifted up the smoldering canvases of the lodges.

Black Elk was there, having riden desperately out with others from Pine Ridge when the sounds of the heavy guns announced sure annihilation. Armed with his vision and nothing more he galloped his lathered pony through the smoking destruction out along the gulch,

“and what he saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies. . .scattered all along where they been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them there. Sometimes they were heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them have been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.”

Numbers here are meaningless, but Gen. Nelson A.Miles in charge of operations, spoke truly when he laconically reported, “I think very few Indians have escaped.” (pp 293-294, Beyond Geography)

There is no space between the archaic wish to tame the savages ‘to the last man, woman, and child’ and the contemporary claim that enough vigilance, gun-wielding citizens and patriots, and surveillance will do the trick.


photographic inversion from While Seated.

Leave a Comment

Filed under current events, psychological anthropology