Discard the generals

Source of Danziger cartoon


An old question: why do people prefer violent solutions that history shows to be ineffectual? From the earliest times, conquest, colonialism, apartheid, and other forms of violent repression arouse violent liberation responses. And the undoubted heroes that make it into legend are those who find peaceful solutions to injustice: Buda, Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Fehullah Gulen, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, Mother Teresa, the monks in Tibet, the anonymous boy who danced the tank to a stop in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But somehow people continue to think they can accomplish something positive with armament.

From Manifest Destiny to the Alamo, from Korea to Vietnam, and now from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the people who sell us guns want us to use them. We fight “over there” and our kids shoot up their schoolmates "over here".

It’s time to find another way.

If a mouse in a Skinner-box always makes the wrong turn, it is
discarded as an experimental animal. Our generals always advise us to bomb’em back to the stone-age, and we follow patriotically along. Maybe we should discard some of those generals.

Obama and the Dogs of War

here is no end to war.






Chris Hedges in his article, “Becoming what we seek to destroy” says it well: We are

“ … guided by a president who once again has no experience of war and defers to the bull-necked generals and militarists whose careers, power and profits depend on expanded war, we are transformed into monsters.

This is the point: we are becoming the enemy. Every time we are confronted by the atrocities of the past, we chant, “Never again”. But we do not change.

The Pope once again decries the Nazi killings. But in the present-day, living-world the violence is the same, and the excuses are similar.

In Sri Lanka a well-fed government spokesman accuses the Tamil Tigers of killing the Tamils. This may be true, but we have heard authorities from different countries use the “human shield” excuse so many times for their massacres, it has become rhetorically suspect. The Israelis used the same language to justify the slaughter of the Palestinians. Now the United States says the killings and massive exodus en Pakistan are due to the same pretext: the “enemy” seems to practice self-immolation just to give us bad press. It is a problem of PR: the Associated Press went so far as to call the deaths “awkward”.


I am outraged, but it seems that power has a “Gatopardo” existence: the term refers to an Italian novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. In this novel the main character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, negotiates and manipulates things so that his aristocratic family can continue to benefit even during Garibaldi's populist changes in the late 19th century.

In the same way, armies and arms manufacturers continue to market their wares and ply their trade even though so many of us scream bloody murder.

As always, let's enthusiastically let lose the dogs of war!

Prosperity and peace ≠ terrorism and war

But misery and revenge does equal terrorism and war


IMAGINE:

1. All that war money had been spent in the Middle East on irrigation, schools, hospitals, and the like.
2. Pakistan (and Afghanistan and Irak) had become prosperous.
3. The people had begun to demand democratic participation in their political and economic systems.
3. The ordinary Taliban supporters had decided that it was better to be prosperous. They had decided to send their kids to school, and had abandoned their armed struggle.
4. The Taliban leaders, responsible for all that violence, had been tried in legally constituted courts.
5. Those in the U.S. administration responsible for indiscriminate killing, torture, corruption, and other violence had been tried in legally constituted courts.

WOULD THE WORLD HAVE BEEN A SAFER PLACE?:

Disobey the wave!

Alter suffering yesterday in a man- (or woman-) eating traffic jam, I thought I’d post some useful techniques for avoiding so much despair.


The first is: disobey the wave!

First, an explanation. Traffic isn’t uniform. It moves in clusters or bunches as can be appreciated in a video that can be seen at this address. In slow-moving traffic the effect is more pronounced. From the air, the long string of cars looks like an expansion and compression wave, even though one’s immediate experience is just of starting and stopping the car.

We might say we obey a physical law just like any other inert particle of matter.

When I realized this, my wounded self-pride made me try to disobey the law. But then I noticed the effect my disobedience had on the cars behind me.


To achieve this we have to adopt a median speed and allow a space between our car and the one in front of us, a sort of an air-bag that grows in fast traffic and diminishes when the cars move more slowly. We are basically transmitting the wave to the empty space and for this reason we don’t have to start and stop so much. Our cars don’t over-heat and we get where we are going with less fuss and bother.

Another result is that all the cars behind us also have a more or less uniform speed.