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“Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

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* “WUR of October 5th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

Please check out our latest “anti-coercion commercials” posted on YouTube. Art by Wassily Kandinsky (except in “Future Freedom” which presents “Freedom Sun” by David Sterenberg) and original music and beats by Thandiwe Satterwhite. The entire collection can be found at: “Nascence Anti-coercion Commercials”:

 

“We are asserting our common ownership of the earth… and as soon as we make our own bodies part of that goal…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-10.04) “anti-coercion commercial”:

 

“Hannah Arendt had it wrong… it's not evil that's banal… it's obedience…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-10.11) three “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“When we give food to an animal… that has a universal meaning in the language of life… it means: ‘I want you to live.’ In the world I want… we don’t lie when we do that. So the only logical… realistic goal for us if we want to determine ourselves… if we want to live our gifts… is the ‘opposite of this… so our challenge now… is to define it…”

 

“…so we have a responsibility to our posterity… no less than to ourselves… to fight for and achieve the absolute prerequisite for living freely… i.e. living our dreams: freedom-leisure-happiness… based in universal individual freedom… premised on freedom from necessity… material abundance for all… not just for the few…”

 

“…and I know folks are doing that… they’re putting their own gifts first… over jobs… I’m just suggesting that we take the next step… of organizing around that truth…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-10.23) three “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“Organizational forms are mated to the task at hand… and what are our tasks… those of we-the-people… at this moment in the human story…”

 

“Remember… this ain’t about nobody forcing nobody… we don’t want your stuff… trust. That’s the point… there is abundance. But we need our global-interconnections to actually realize that possibility… that potential… if for no other reason than that ‘power’ has created so much havoc…”

 

“It seems to me what we’re talking about is a globally-interconnected network of villages… land gifted to folks who want to engage in this effort to design a future without force…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-10.29) four “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“…Returning to the article, ‘Discovering the Water Planet’… ‘each year we kill and discard globally… thirty million metric tons of accidentally-caught marine life….’ Now think if we ended work… Without force in our lives… we would live in harmony… we would ask of the earth only what we needed and give back more… because we give thanks… we have time to…”

 

“Why do we accept the limits imposed by ‘power’? Why do we tell ourselves we’re ‘making a dent in the system’ when we’re not even scratching it? And then… why do we tell ourselves making a dent… added to the dents of others… will eventually end it?… when they’re not aimed at the structural underpinnings?…”

 

“So much of our forward movement to freedom rests on language… on knowing exactly what we’re saying… because we’ve discussed the ‘meanings’ of things together… and have come to ‘certainty’ about them… such that we know exactly what we’re saying when we say it… and therefore… mean it…”

 

“Sisters and Brothers: I think we should talk continuously… perhaps in ‘Meet-Ups’… about the ‘opposite’ of ‘power’…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-11.03) “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“…he put his thought-process on hold. What we haven't sufficiently credited is that… that’s what ‘work’ does… not just what ‘work in the military’ does… that’s what ‘work overall’ does… it puts our thought-process on hold… and when we accept others telling us what our work is… we’re shown the most relevant meaning of George Eliot’s words: ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds …’”

 

“Why aren’t we saying the goal for all of us to unite behind? What bothers me… is not… at base… money… it’s their control of our lives that bothers me. Money simply tokens this control… measures its degree… but keeping you and me from developing our full human possibilities… when there’s absolutely no need… no reason… beyond lust for supremacy… To do this signals a narcissistic depravity that would bring down all life in its wake… cares not a whit for planetary health… hears no counsel beyond the walls of its poor self… cannot its own… dis-owned self… hear… What is our goal?… if not to release our lives… all life… from this… death grip. I think we have to be concerned at this juncture… when all life is at risk… with the narrowing of goal implied by ‘nationalisms’… of whatever kind…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-11.08) “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“…this train called ‘class’… called ‘just sit back and enjoy the ride and let the big boys… the “important ones”… drive… is rolling downhill… and it’s got a speed to it… The story in which they ride our backs… that they call ‘Progress’… was written by ‘power’… who then strangles all other stories… cuts them off at the pass… as Plato instructed… It’s the fact that they had a story… a plan… that made them ‘powerful’… because it meant they had certainty… and could move forward with conviction… we cannot get free unless we deeply believe… that our happiness is the point… our reason -to-be… our babies come to show us that… and then we give them our backs… it’s time to trust those toothless smiles our babes give us… trust… the flight and song of birds… the lolling sound of the ‘useless’ waves… It’s time to trust that joy is our birthright… and must always be the core of the new story we write… the story that is ‘the opposite’ of ‘power’… It only takes a few to begin to make this world based in trusting our bodies’ truth… it putting that first… based in letting our joy live. It only takes a few… and others will come to it. It only takes a few… and we are already many… It’s not the earth we must save… it’s ourselves… just put that first… and the earth can take care of herself…”

 

“…Once upon a waiting future… empty bottom empty bottom… Once upon an empty bottom… future waiting… waiting… Once upon a waiting future… future… future… future…” Let’s talk. Let’s make a brief but thought-provoking moment… to engage discussion. Let’s discuss a world without coercion.

 

Please check out our latest (2014-11.15) three “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“These cons – “people are violent…” “industry is ruthless…” “the security of the nation is threatened…” “‘global warming’ means we need ‘the state’… – are all presented to us as disparate… to encourage and reinforce our fragmentation – and deep confusion – when in truth all are weaves from the single thread of coercion… and all reflect the state’s need to seem legitimate… …and [relatedly…] its need to keep divisions – particularly hierarchical ones (are any not?) – well-sown between us. So certain ‘demographics’ – slotted categories of ‘class’-humans – will be presented as ‘more violent’ than others… while the middle ranks of ‘knowledge workers’ are reassured they don’t abandon their children – oh no… not them – because ‘studies show’ they ‘spend’ more time with their children than did their mothers – as if the hyper-scrutiny and over-management and deep training in hierarchy and ‘class’-service – ‘work’… it’s true… our parents were less dedicated to – as if this heightened surveillance and obedience-training they give their children were… somehow… not abandonment…. Remember that illustration from Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood in which a young vacationing-couple are enjoying ice cream cones… while their toddler cried? Well, that’s what Alice Miller means by – one example at least of – ‘abandonment’. So let us not be duped by the propaganda over the airwaves… which is trying to implant in our minds a very literal meaning for that word. No. ‘Child abandonment’ is a broad category that includes ‘training your children to be obedient’…”

 

“I happened upon a journal entry (of 04.02.06) from 8 years ago in which I was pretty much resigned to my captive status… …resigned to not living my gifts… accepting their relinquishment… in exchange for an insecure… tenuous… always conditional ‘security’… and a bit of ‘entertainment’. My body knew I was being lied to… but I couldn’t see a way out of it… because there is no individual solution… not for an individual person… or an individual nation. We are one – all of us – being masticated or managed together… on that shifting plate. I use that metaphor a lot… and the last time I forgot… to attribute… and give thanks: Fame is fickle food… Upon a shifting plate… Whose table once a… Guest but not… The second time is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect… And with ironic caw… Flap past it to the… Farmer’s corn – Men eat of it and die.” (Emily Dickinson, # 1659)

 

“During the Great Depression here in the U.S. folks were paid to travel across the South to gather from former captives their memories of captivity (and I hate that word ‘slave’… it assumes facts not in evidence: that there is such a thing. My use of it in my very first blog was to say: “if you apply that concept to one… apply it to everyone … we are all in the same boat…” Trust. We are all in Auschwitz. No matter what nice upholstery they give us for the particular cage we’re stuck in. And it’s simply ‘betrayal’ to pretend otherwise.) What if we started gathering our visions of freedom and good fellowship… and the ‘infrastructure’ that supports it… collecting these visions from each other globally?… information-gathering for founding a free… globally-consciously-interconnecting society… for a purpose that we have made – we-the-people… globally…”

 

Please check out our latest (2014-11.23) four “anti-coercion commercials”:

 

“Workable Plan…”

 

“Second Sun”

 

“There’s Fascists A’foot!…”

 

“What If We Flipped It?…”

September 29th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers:

 

I keep longing for our own version of that moment in the film The Bear when the Big Bear sustains the Little Bear’s courage… and I don’t mean to suggest by this that Hong Kong is little… just the opposite… you are large in spirit… but a totalitarian system – and I mean by this the global-state… not China – a global totalitarian system cannot be dissolved except by all of us together.

 

“Have faith” (“Have faith!”)… we must say… when we hear the future’s call and long habit makes us start to turn away…

 

“Have faith” (“Have faith!”)… we must say… as we move in steadfast fashion past the blocks they put our way…

 

“Have faith” (“Have faith!”)… we must say… when we reach out hands though we cannot see our fellows in the darkness…

 

“Have faith” (“Have faith!”)… we must say… when in heeding freedom’s call… we see our brothers growing strong… we see our sisters standing tall… in every land and language that we have to stand in…

 

…have faith… have faith… have faith…

 

Have faith.

 

What are our human gifts for… if we don’t use them to sustain each other’s struggles to get free of this system? I keep longing for our own version of that moment in the film The Bear when the Big Bear sustains the Little Bear’s courage… and I don’t mean to suggest by this that Hong Kong is little… just the opposite… you are large in spirit… but a totalitarian system – and I mean by this the global-state… not China – a global totalitarian system cannot be dissolved except by all of us together.

 

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To our courageous brothers and sisters in Hong Kong… stay strong…

…the tactics of ‘power’ never change…

…across class… across state…

…when in doubt… …they say…

…put agents in their way…

…to provoke what they hope…

…will dissolve your resolve…

…shake your sound connection to your source…

…in peace… and love…

…but…

…please hold your stance Hong Kong…

…and may we in the U.S. do more than mark your courage…

…may we learn to back you better…

…so we can grow strong together…

…throw off our fetters…

…and move on…

…to a free future…

 

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“…How long shall they kill our… most courageous… while we stand aside and look?…” What is a Left for?… if not to have the backs of our brothers and sisters standing up to the state – and this means ultimately the global-state with its totalitarian ambitions – and its determination to have total control of us…

 

If we choose to view the various militaries in the film as symbolic of ‘the people’ – and I know this is a stretch… and that the militaristic and ‘class’-bound nature of the film makes it highly propagandistic… but… if we take that stretch to see these militaries of ‘nations’ as stand-ins for ‘the people’… and the hate-full aliens as metaphors for global-‘power’… it’s possible to see in Independence Day strategic guidance. I’ve thought this for a while… but needed our developed discussions of ‘the nation’ (and sufficient time to dull my irritation that Vivica Fox was denied her due top billing – actually it hasn’t dulled… it’s a living grievance…) to stand that thought upright… in truest light….

 

A week or so ago I listened to a woman being interviewed for ‘the news’… who was protesting the bait-and-switch of a chain-grocer who’d promised ‘living wages’ and delivered less than chump-change… and the interviewer said, “…so you see the union as a weapon in your hands…” and she replied, “…no… I’m the union… I’m the weapon…”

 

Now that’s an example of thinking in ‘earth-terms’: direct… full of ‘heart’… it has a pulse… life-based… no intermediating abstract concepts. It’s her body she’s defending… not some abstraction… not a term rendered acceptable by its frequent repetition in the piped-in propaganda…

 

…it’s her body she’s defending… it’s life that must be honored… and it’s personal.

 

We are the animating… generative… force behind all innovation. We are the ones who must decide what is… or if is… ‘the nation’… what should exist beyond our cooperative association through our extended-tribes… what to call the form it makes… direct and self-determined… that eschews the bait-and-switch of ‘keepers’… of sheepdogs put in place to keep us sheep.

 

These are decisions we must make… not ‘keepers’… and certainly not conveyed to us as ‘inevitable outcomes’… of some fanciful ‘law’ of ‘economics’… or of ‘historical stages’…. In plain light… now we see clearly… such notions are exposed for the phantasmagoria that they are.

 

On the page “Embracing Global Goals, Scope and Action: Becoming Global Actors… Claiming the ‘All’”… we’ll discuss further the following quote as it’s suggestive:

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor.…

[…here we see a good example of thinking logically… analytically… which unfortunately we don’t hear much from the official spokespeople… rather what we hear is, “this is what I want now let’s imagine that it’s going to happen….” No… we have to have an analysis to think strategically. It could be flawed… but let’s put our analysis out there… please… the logic steps between Points A, B, C, D. So what they are saying is… they’ve thought about it – good practice to emulate… let’s always think it before we accept the propaganda we hear over the airwaves. So… “The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital…” – and that, in a way, is just a tautology: you can’t have a ‘class’ devoted to the ‘augmentation of capital’ unless you have the ‘augmentation of capital’… and how do you get the ‘augmentation of capital’? – this is part of our discussion in “Embracing Global Goals…” – but so much of the thinking on the Left… and the thinking that we’re given to work with as young people coming into our body’s truth of “resistance to ‘what-is’” because it doesn’t feel right – so much of what we’re given as ‘thought’ is tautology because it is a ‘system’ that is containing us… and so all the thoughts that we’re permitted to think end up being circular: they just circle you right back to where you are. This is up for me especially because yesterday I checked the book World Order by Henry Kissinger out of the library and just starting it… it is a world-view unto itself… and that is, in fact, what ‘power’ does: it presents the world it has created as the only ‘reality’ possible… in order to sustain it over time… and Kissinger told us in his book On China that the role of ‘statesmen’ is to define the future… so we have to wrest that prerogative away from them – their claim will not just dissipate of its own… that’s what we don’t hear discussed… that iron grip that they have on naming us… naming ‘reality’… claiming the future… doesn’t go away by our simply saying: “…you don’t need to do this anymore… see?… see what it’s caused?… it’s caused the destruction of the planet… you know?… amazing disparities of wealth… horrific misery and displacement… and prevents human beings from being human beings on the earth… and so, you see, it’s quite clear, that… you need to let go of your iron grip on control of… everything…” – and that… in a sense… is A to Z of ‘strategy’… so far… on the Left… that we’re allowed to see… except… when we-the-people call the question… as in Hong Kong… as in Egypt… – and if we don’t learn how to have the backs of our brothers and sisters… so they can have ours… we’re going to be witnessing a lot more punishment of those who stand up… and I’m tired of it…. Remember Bob Marley’s words… as he was pleading for us to see what’s going on: “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”… How long… will they punish… the most courageous… while we stand aside and look? What is a ‘Left” for?… if not to move us all forward to a different future?… one that’s defined by all the people. And when you see your brothers and sisters trying to do that… and say nothing… you are sustaining the ‘legitimacy’ of states keeping us subjects. Let’s have that discussion… – P.S.]

…the issue never was the ‘development of the productive forces’ – in order to enable freedom: universal leisure – that the issue always was defeating ‘power’… that our nature always has been open… generous… cooperative… gregarious – as was the case with the gorillas in times past… and… as with the gorillas… a long experience of cruelty changed all that… for we class-bound humans… but we’ll change it back…

 

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.…

 

[“Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers…” another word for this is ‘atomization’. ‘Atomization’ is key… is a key underlying premise for the existence of wage labor… they have to separate us. So, just by the analysis… the logic… given to us 170 years ago… it’s obvious that this system is based in coerced work… which is based on keeping us apart from each other. With those two clear facts alone… the result of solid analysis… we should have, by now, if the official spokespeople had really been representing us – we-the-people – we have had all we needed to single-mindedly keep our focus on what we have to do to get us free: end coerced work. And this ain’t about changing who owns the planet… who controls the resources – it’s not about that. It’s about each individual one of us not having a leash attached to our necks… – P.S.]

 

…The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. (The Communist Manifesto)

I believe the focus on ‘the accumulation of capital’ is a focus on appearances… a focus on ‘the means’ that hides the underlying motives… and the human face behind them…

 

…that the true object was not swelling figures on a spreadsheet… but the control of us that removing from our hands all means would bring: ‘power’ unleashed the forces of Greed… to do its work and render us… absolutely helpless – and that the way out, necessarily, is informed by this as well.

 

I believe the issue never was the ‘development of the productive forces’ – in order to enable freedom: universal leisure – that the issue always was defeating ‘power’… that our nature always has been open… generous… cooperative… gregarious – as was the case with the gorillas in times past… and… as with the gorillas… a long experience of cruelty changed all that… for we class-bound humans… but we’ll change it back.

…I actually think the problem is that the official spokespersons (for ‘we’) have a management mindset… a deep belief that ‘we’ must be ‘managed’ (which leads them to help ‘power’ with that project… unconsciously… essentially, help ‘power’ ‘manage’ the world….) So they want to give us ‘jobs’ so we can continue to exist and not get restless (while ‘power’ keeps chipping away at us…)

 

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…So they want to give us ‘jobs’ so we can continue to exist and not get restless… no matter our gifts lie fallow… ad infinitum. I long to ask folks like this: “do you think it’s right that we never get to develop our gifts?” And while she claims she wants a new ‘vision’… an ‘alternative’ to ‘the system’… if ‘work’ remains coerced… she is misleading her listeners. Let’s take in what Marx just said… that ‘coerced work’ is the basis of ‘the system’ – we have all been reared to be subjects… to put ourselves on the market… to deny our gifts’ full scope… to devalue them. And the official spokespersons all reinforce what we’d see as obviously wrong… if our thoughts were not conditioned. So you see the difference between ‘claiming the all’… and helping ‘power’ fix the state?

 

(…I just heard [October 3, 2014] Naomi Klein say that the problem… the source of the inertia of we-the-people being stuck in this system… is that ‘we’ have an ‘extractivist’ mindset. I actually think the problem is that the official spokespersons (for ‘we’) have a management mindset… a deep belief that ‘we’ must be ‘managed’ (which leads them to help ‘power’ with that project… unconsciously… essentially, help ‘power’ ‘manage’ the world….) So they want to give us ‘jobs’ so we can continue to exist and not get restless (while ‘power’ keeps chipping away at us [I listened to a caller on a radio talk show say that ‘the problem is overpopulation’… that ‘the economic system’ cannot support the existing population – we have always been conditioned to put ‘saving the economy’ first… and this is the illogic that that conditioning leads to… someone saying we need to control population to get it more in sync with the ‘economic system – this is straight-up propaganda. There’s not too many of us… the problem is we have been kept captive. Paid-agents aside… let’s stop repeating this lie… please…]) no matter our gifts lie fallow… ad infinitum. I long to ask folks like this: “do you think it’s right that we never get to develop our gifts?” And while she claims she wants a new ‘vision’… an ‘alternative’ to ‘the system’… if ‘work’ remains coerced… she is misleading her listeners. Let’s take in what Marx just said… that ‘coerced work’ is the basis of ‘the system’ – we have all been reared to be subjects… to put ourselves on the market… to deny our gifts’ full scope… to devalue them. And the official spokespersons all reinforce what we’d see as obviously wrong… if our thoughts were not conditioned. So you see the difference between ‘claiming the all’… and helping ‘power’ fix the state?)

It never was the case that ‘objective laws’ would overcome our atomization… it always was the case that we must do this for ourselves through our conscious action… when… by appreciating all the ancestors’ hard ‘work’ towards our freedom… ‘power’ can’t stay hidden anymore… and we share this information. And all that’s needed now… is our taking that first step.

 

In the film Independence Day the only way the aliens could be defeated was by simultaneous global action… and so it is with our monster known as ‘global-power’: the global-state-statesmen who relentlessly drive us forward to their destination… towards the world they want in which our backs are bowed. To defeat such organization… backed by the stolen means of the planet… the only strategy that works is joint global action. Only together as a global-‘One’ can we end this ‘system’.

 

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…and we need clarity as well on a bunch of other questions… like ‘governance’… and those base assumptions like the inevitability of ‘rule’. ‘Why do we think it’s needed?…’ we should be asking… ‘why?’ at this moment… when… after being milked for millennia… we are finally in that world in which our freedom has come due. We don’t need ‘rule’… so what replaces it?… if not ‘fully-developing-individual-humans… agreeing to ensure we all have leisure… agreeing to work cooperatively toward our common goals…

 

In Independence Day they had to find an old… an earth-based… language to speak in… that unified all nations… that enabled unity in action… enabled them… in a single, coordinated strike… to win back the land… and dissolve the ‘aliens’.

 

So much of our forward movement to freedom rests on language… on knowing exactly what we’re saying – because we’ve discussed the meanings of things together and have come to certainty about them – such that we know exactly what we’re saying when we say it… and therefore mean it.

 

It’s not possible to develop ‘certainty’ overall… about the world we want (and we desperately need certainty to move forward…) unless we have certainty about what things (terms) mean.

 

For instance when I hear a Benedictine nun… organizing to achieve an independent Catalonia… when I hear her say: “For democracy to be real you need small political units…” I wonder… is it really ‘democracy’ she’s wanting?… or is it freedom? What’s clear is that we don’t have clarity globally on either word: ‘democracy’… or ‘freedom’… and we need to…

 

…and we need clarity as well on a bunch of other questions… like ‘governance’… and those base assumptions like the inevitability of ‘rule’. ‘Why do we think it’s needed?… we should be asking… ‘why?” at this moment… when… after being milked for millennia… we are finally in that world in which our freedom has come due. We don’t need ‘rule’… so what replaces it?… if not ‘fully-developing-individual-humans… agreeing to ensure we all have leisure… agreeing to work cooperatively toward our common goals. We don’t need ‘rule’… we need to be free. We need our bodies back.

 

Because the official voices reinforce the hollow terms… we adopt their use before thinking them through. It is time to think them through. Language is how we claim the world, we said… and by this we don’t mean inventing jargon… fencing off a piece of ‘class’-non-reality and creating terms for crawling around in that Freak Show… …but rather… seeing the whole world with fresh eyes and attempting to describe it… that fresh way of seeing… so that we-the-people can come to some decisions… on this matter called ‘our future’… and this matter called ‘our human-ness’. ‘Power’s language is one we’re all taught early… it’s called: “justification for submission to Authority”… or: “the necessity of ‘Rule’”… and its key premises are violence and division… and the calcified belief in the inevitability of scarcity… despite the earth’s persistent song… that this is wrong…

 

And when Mario Savio said: “Unless we’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all…” – this makes no sense… when… ‘the machine’ exists specifically to create our ‘unfreedom’. So his words… though powerfully spoken… revealed… again… the lack of clear definitions… and the need for our discussions… so that we-the-people can come to some decisions… on this matter called ‘our future’… and this matter called ‘our human-ness’…. This is never discussed… the fact that we have allowed the statesmen… that tiny tiny tiny miniscule few… the .0001%… to define our human-ness… as they tell us ad infinitum “there is ‘scarcity’…” “there is not enough for all…” “let us manage scarce resources for you…” – to which we reply: “Nonsense.”

 

Because the official voices reinforce the hollow terms… we adopt their use before thinking them through.

 

It is time to think them through.

 

Language is how we claim the world, we said… and by this we don’t mean inventing jargon… fencing off a piece of ‘class’-non-reality and creating terms for crawling around in that Freak Show…

 

…but rather… seeing the whole world with fresh eyes and attempting to describe it… that fresh way of seeing….

 

This relates to ‘strategy’ – a recurring theme as we find the right path to freedom.

 

We’ve argued that to find it we must see it is the opposite of ‘power’s… and so we need a language also so conceived….

 

‘Power’s language is one we’re all taught early… it’s called: “justification for submission to Authority”… or: “the necessity of ‘Rule’”… and its key premises are violence and division (you see that unleashed all around us today… in order to create a supposed need for them…) and the calcified belief in the inevitability of scarcity… despite the earth’s persistent song… that this is wrong.

 

So the language of ‘the system’ is dishonest… has falseness seething at its rotting core…

 

…and though everywhere we see it crumbling… we’re clinging yet to the disintegration… for lack of adequate language to clear away debris… and plant new seeds….

 

We have to start with language…

 

…for language is how we claim the world.

 

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(…but… it very well may be… it’s difficult to know because we don’t have our own media… that the majority are not clinging to the disintegration at all… but rather… that we have a situation in which ‘power’ is massively engaged to suppress dissent right now…)

 

Continuing with Chapter 17 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Jewish Flight”… – P.S.]

 

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“The total number of Jews who fled west in the two years after the end of the war is probably in the region of 200,000 from Poland, 18,000 from Hungary, 19,000 from Romania, and perhaps a further 18,000 from Czechoslovakia – although most of this last group were forced out not because they were Jewish but because the Czechs considered them German. When one also factors in the 40,000 or so Jews who fled the same countries in the years 1948 – 50, we reach a grand total of almost 300,000 people who were forced to leave their countries because of anti-Semitic persecution. This is, if anything, a slightly conservative estimate…” – [A world was being crafted… do any doubt it?… doubt the existence… of those quiet conferences… deciding how to re-package us discretely… much more ‘neatly’… much less threatening… than had been our budding… unity…. Do any doubt the accelerating machine called ‘total privatization of everything’ has called the question: “We must successfully confront… and overcome… the dark legacy of mutual mistrust that’s been planted in our midst by ‘power’…” Do any doubt… we’re doing it? – P.S.]

The Flight

The reaction to the anti-Semitic violence in eastern Europe was dramatic. Many survivors who had gone back to Poland after the war now returned to Germany on the grounds that it was safer in the country that had originally persecuted them than it was at home. The stories they told dissuaded others from making the same journey. ‘Whatever you do, don’t go back to Poland,’ was the advice given to Michael Etkind. ‘The Poles are killing all the Jews returning from the camps.’ Harry Balsam was told the same thing: ‘They said that we must be mad to want to go back as they were still killing Jews in Poland… They told us the Poles were doing what the Germans could not manage, and that they had been lucky to come out alive.’ As early as October, 1945, Joseph Levine of the Joint Distribution Committee was writing to New York that ‘everyone reports murder and pillage by the Poles and that all the Jews want to get out of Poland.’

Fortunately for many Polish Jews, and indeed Jews from several other countries in eastern Europe, an escape route had been set up for them. In the aftermath of the war, groups of determined Jews had set up an organization called Brichah (‘Flight’), which had begun to secure a whole series of safe houses, methods of transport and unofficial border crossing points in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. At first they had been a very clandestine organization, smuggling truckloads of Jews across borders by bribing guards with money and alcohol, but by 1946 they had attained a semi-official status amongst the governments of eastern Europe. In May that year the Prime Minister of Poland, Edward Osobka-Morawski, stated openly that his government would not stand in the way of Jews who wished to emigrate to Palestine – an assertion he repeated after the Kielce pogrom. In the aftermath of the pogrom, a former border crossing point was negotiated between one of the commanders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Yitzhak ‘Antek’ Zuckerman, and the Polish Defence Minister Marian Spychalski. Other prominent people associated with Brichah organized similar border crossings with the Hungarians, the Romanians and the American authorities in Germany, and the Czechs agreed to supply special trains for the transport of Jewish refugees across the country.

The numbers of Jews fleeing westwards were significant, but they increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Kielce pogrom. In May 1946 Brichah organized the flight of 3,502 people from Poland. This rose to approximately 8,000 in June. But in July, after the pogrom, the figures more than doubled to 19,000, and then almost doubled again to 35,346 in August, before falling back to 12,379 in September. These figures do not include the 10 – 20,000 who fled Poland by other means, including putting themselves in the hands of private speculators and smugglers. In addition, the Joint Distribution Committee in Bratislava reported that some 14,000 Hungarian Jews had fled through Czechoslovakia in the three months after Kielce. In total, between 90,000 and 95,000 Jewish refugees are thought to have fled from eastern Europe in July, August and September 1946.

The total number of Jews who fled west in the two years after the end of the war is probably in the region of 200,000 from Poland, 18,000 from Hungary, 19,000 from Romania, and perhaps a further 18,000 from Czechoslovakia – although most of this last group were forced out not because they were Jewish but because the Czechs considered them German. When one also factors in the 40,000 or so Jews who fled the same countries in the years 1948 – 50, we reach a grand total of almost 300,000 people who were forced to leave their countries because of anti-Semitic persecution. This is, if anything, a slightly conservative estimate.

[A world was being crafted… do any doubt it?… doubt the existence… of those quiet conferences… deciding how to re-package us discretely… much more ‘neatly’… much less threatening… than had been our budding… unity…. Do any doubt the accelerating machine called ‘total privatization of everything’ has called the question: “We must successfully confront… and overcome… the dark legacy of mutual mistrust that’s been planted in our midst by ‘power’…” Do any doubt… we’re doing it? – P.S.]

“In the early phases of World War II, given the uncertainty and ambivalence of 1941 – 3, the interaction of business, politics, and government had a conservative tone. Part of this conservatism was due to lingering prewar isolationism, with conservative Republicans speaking openly of “Mr. Roosevelt’s War…” “Roosevelt also faced dissension in the military and intelligence communities. Not a few senior officers, especially in the navy, disagreed with the White House priority on supporting Britain against Germany. They urged greater attention to the Pacific theater and war against Japan. Some intelligence officials, in turn, were ambiguous about favoring the Soviet Union over Germany, maintaining quiet connections through Switzerland with non-Nazi Germans and some Nazi officials. During the winter of 1942, the Swiss-based Allen Dulles discussed with emissaries, at least half seriously, a settlement in which Germany would keep Austria and some other new territory, SS chief Heinrich Himmler would replace Hitler […and Dulles’ musings shouldn’t surprise us… or be considered ‘unrealistic’… look who’s now the Indian President… and in Afghanistan we see a similar dynamic… – P.S.], and Eastern Europe would be made into a cordon sanitaire [‘…a series or chain of small neutral buffer states around a larger, potentially dangerous or hostile state…’] against Communism. By way of backdrop, Missouri senator Harry Truman had argued in 1941 that as between the warring Russians and Germans, ‘if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way, let them kill as many as possible.’ It was not a sentiment that got Truman in trouble….”

Where did all these Jews go? In the short term they aimed for the displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy; but the irony that it should be these former Axis countries that would provide them with salvation did not escape them. Their long-term aim was to leave mainland Europe altogether. Many wanted to go to Britain or parts of the British Empire; many more wanted to get to the United States; but by far the majority wanted to go to Palestine. They knew that Zionists were pushing for a Jewish state there, and considered such a state the only place where they might realistically be safe from anti-Semitism. [‘Power’ made sure of that… didn’t they? – P.S.]

They were helped in this aim by just about every nation apart from Britain. The Soviets, who were perfectly happy for their Jews to flee Europe, did not place obstacles in their way and opened their borders for Jews – but only Jews – to exit. The Poles and the Hungarians, as we have seen, did whatever they could to make life for Jews uncomfortable, and again encouraged them to leave by any means possible. The Romanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Italians and French all provided ports for Jews to embark on ships bound for the Holy Land, and rarely made any effort to stop them. But it was the Americans who helped the Jews most of all – not by allowing them to come to the United States, but by facilitating their journey towards British-controlled Palestine….

[Let’s add an additional layer… undertone… to the unfolding story told by Keith Lowe… background themes against which to better see… U.S. Middle East-scheming:

 

“In the early phases of World War II, given the uncertainty and ambivalence of 1941 – 3, the interaction of business, politics, and government had a conservative tone. Part of this conservatism was due to lingering prewar isolationism, with conservative Republicans speaking openly of “Mr. Roosevelt’s War.” Both elites and the broader electorate reacted to the apparent defeats experienced by the United States during 1942, from losses to Japan in the Pacific to embarrassment at German hands in Tunisia and the devastation wrought by U-boats in the sea lanes off the U.S. East Coast. Together, they brought large and unexpected Republican congressional gains in that year’s midterm elections. The House of Representatives, in particular, became strongly conservative.

 

“Roosevelt also faced dissension in the military and intelligence communities. Not a few senior officers, especially in the navy, disagreed with the White House priority on supporting Britain against Germany. They urged greater attention to the Pacific theater and war against Japan. Some intelligence officials, in turn, were ambiguous about favoring the Soviet Union over Germany, maintaining quiet connections through Switzerland with non-Nazi Germans and some Nazi officials. During the winter of 1942, the Swiss-based Allen Dulles discussed with emissaries, at least half seriously, a settlement in which Germany would keep Austria and some other new territory, SS chief Heinrich Himmler would replace Hitler […and Dulles’ musings shouldn’t surprise us… or be considered ‘unrealistic’… look who’s now the Indian President… and in Afghanistan we see a similar dynamic… – P.S.], and Eastern Europe would be made into a cordon sanitaire [‘…a series or chain of small neutral buffer states around a larger, potentially dangerous or hostile state…’] against Communism. By way of backdrop, Missouri senator Harry Truman had argued in 1941 that as between the warring Russians and Germans, ‘if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way, let them kill as many as possible.’ It was not a sentiment that got Truman in trouble….

 

“…Roosevelt was hardly well positioned to pick a fight with important elites of the same U.S. business community he needed to mobilize for a war… For the government to single out Farish’s [‘William S. Farish, the publicly pilloried (for his company’s connections to I.G. Farben) chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey…’] flagrant withholding [from U.S. authorities] of processes for making artificial rubber was one thing; to tangle with the Rockefellers, the du Ponts, and half of America’s largest corporations was something else… Oil executives hinted that too much interference with their particular industry could jeopardize wartime petroleum supplies. Allen Dulles and others in the intelligence community made that same point.… Here it is well to underscore oil’s strategic role, as described by Daniel Yergin: “America’s entry into the war would be followed, in 1942 and 1943, by a wholesale redefinition of the importance of the Middle East, based on a new outlook that completely gripped Washington, if not always the oil companies…”

 

“During that embattled spring and summer of 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt was hardly well positioned to pick a fight with important elites of the same U.S. business community he needed to mobilize for a war – one that some disgruntled industrial leaders believed the president had courted. Grousing was especially widespread in the strategic oil and chemical industries, in which a number of important companies either had cartel and patent-sharing relationships with German firms like I.G. Farben […the company… we learned from Miklos that manufactured the gas used in Germany’s extermination camps… – P.S.] or had set up subsidiaries in Germany. Two other much-affected industries were automobiles (General Motors and Ford) and electrical equipment (General Electric and ITT). For the government to single out Farish’s [‘William S. Farish, the publicly pilloried (for his company’s connections to I.G. Farben) chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey…’] flagrant withholding [from U.S. authorities] of processes for making artificial rubber was one thing; to tangle with the Rockefellers, the du Ponts, and half of America’s largest corporations was something else….

 

“Oil executives hinted that too much interference with their particular industry could jeopardize wartime petroleum supplies. Allen Dulles and others in the intelligence community made that same point. Given the political climate, restraint carried the day. Here it is well to underscore oil’s strategic role, as described by Daniel Yergin:

America’s entry into the war would be followed, in 1942 and 1943, by a wholesale redefinition of the importance of the Middle East, based on a new outlook that completely gripped Washington, if not always the oil companies. Oil was recognized as the critical strategic commodity for the war and was essential for national power and international predominance. If there was a single resource that was shaping the strategy of the Axis powers, it was oil. If there was a single resource that could defeat them, that, too, was oil. (From Kevin Phillips’ American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush [2004], p. 189 – 91)

[So with that as background… the generosity of the U.S.… in encouraging persecuted Jews to immigrate to Palestine… is revealed as less so… – P.S.]

 

–––

 

* “WUR of October 12th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

My pages are being messed with!… and a war of attrition is being waged on resistance… the ‘power’-guys are supremely confident in their ability to ‘manage’ dissent… confident in the soundness of their tactics for controlling it: agent provocateurs… harassment… weaponry used… against their targets… invisibly…

 

[Forgive the repetition… but my pages are being messed with… – P.S.]

 

“Hong Kong… let’s talk strategy!…” When it comes to thinking ‘strategy’ for we-the-people getting free… we deal ourselves a death-blow if we take ‘state-boxes’ seriously – …that we honor torture-chambers is an abomination before Life. Life is supposed to be sweet… and we make it so when we help each other. It’s our nature to do so. ‘Power’… these global-(totalitarian)-state-statesmen… are the ones that made it an endurance test… – Life is screaming to be done with this madness called ‘the class system’… for which ‘earth-consumption’ is but a move in the chess-game called ‘World Order’… or ‘Supremacy’… and but a single day in which enough of us see that we are the majority… see we share a common longing to be free… that Freedom exists if we but reach for it… is enough… to open up the way to that freedom.

 

October 7th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers:

Hong Kong… let’s talk strategy… with an inverted analogy…

…from the world of labor organizing…

 

…what does ‘power’ of all shades and stripes…

…do to defeat our uprising?…

 

…if not forestall our (to them) dreaded unity…

…with ‘divide-by-stratifying’…

 

…and your position vis-a-vis the mainland…

…is akin to ‘new hires’ brought in…

 

…although not of ‘lower cost’…

…but rather of greater privilege…

 

…a tiered structure of wage…

…blasts ‘unity’ at a blow…

 

…and unions know…

…they must not bow to that deceitful tactic…

 

…that…

…that seed sown…

…defeats the union…

 

…so…

…what does this mean for ‘strategy’?…

 

…if not that fates must be tied…

…across false divides…

 

…and when China… with Hong Kong… decides…

…to plan a 1-day General Strike…

 

…to win for both ‘equal rights’…

…on the highest possible stand established…

…for both lands…

 

…perhaps…

…we here in the U.S.…

…will find our way to taking…

…that same stand.

 

When it comes to thinking ‘strategy’ for we-the-people getting free… we deal ourselves a death-blow if we take ‘state-boxes’ seriously –

 

…that we honor torture-chambers is an abomination before Life.

 

Life is supposed to be sweet… and we make it so when we help each other. It’s our nature to do so. ‘Power’… these global-(totalitarian)-state-statesmen… are the ones that made it an endurance test…

 

…and now… now that there truly is no inch of earth they haven’t contaminated to some degree… it does seem no corner exists in which to plant our alternative…

 

…but…

 

…it only seems that way…

 

…because the human heart has not been conquered yet…

 

…because Life is ready to return to health every second…

 

…because Life is screaming to be done with this madness called ‘the class system’… for which ‘earth-consumption’ is but a move in the chess-game called ‘World Order’… or ‘Supremacy’…

 

…and but a single day in which enough of us see that we are the majority… see we share a common longing to be free… that Freedom exists if we but reach for it… is enough… to open up the way to that freedom.

 

–––

 

“The principle of the national state, that is to say, the political demand that the territory of every state should coincide with the territory inhabited by one nation, is by no means so self-evident as it seems to appear to many people today.……Even if anyone knew what he meant when he spoke of nationality, it would be not at all clear why nationality should be accepted as a fundamental political category, more important for instance than religion, or birth within a certain geographical region, or loyalty to a dynasty, or a political creed like democracy…. But while religion, territory, or a political creed can be more or less clearly determined, nobody has ever been able to explain what he means by a nation, in a way that could be used as a basis for practical politics…. The principle of the national state is not only inapplicable but it has never been clearly conceived. It is a myth. It is an irrational, a romantic and Utopian dream, a dream of naturalism and of tribal collectivism… In spite of its inherent reactionary and irrational tendencies, modern nationalism, strangely enough, was in its short history before Hegel, a revolutionary and liberal creed… It is not without interest to sketch the history of this development, and of the way in which Hegel brought nationalism back into the totalitarian camp where it had belonged from the time when Plato first maintained that Greeks are related to barbarians like masters to slaves. Plato, it will be remembered, unfortunately formulated his fundamental political problem by asking: Who should rule? Whose will should be law?…” (Karl Popper)

 

Karl Popper’s writing on ‘the state’ was not detached… he pretended no dispassion on this matter of ‘the state’… he wrote during the rise… and spread… of Fascism… and saw how the garish robes of romanticism… were used to dress up hate. But the modern notion of ‘nationalism’ didn’t start out that way… Plato-sourced and fed:

The principle of the national state, that is to say, the political demand that the territory of every state should coincide with the territory inhabited by one nation, is by no means so self-evident as it seems to appear to many people today.…

 

[And with this statement we are helped to see… the hidden hand of global-statesmen working behind scenes… clandestinely… determined to craft a global totalitarian ‘reality’. Our Savage Continent readings show this clearly: the implementation of a plan to accomplish exactly what Popper is describing as nonsensical – “one ‘nation’ per land…” – P.S.]

 

…Even if anyone knew what he meant when he spoke of nationality, it would be not at all clear why nationality should be accepted as a fundamental political category, more important for instance than religion, or birth within a certain geographical region, or loyalty to a dynasty, or a political creed like democracy…. But while religion, territory, or a political creed can be more or less clearly determined, nobody has ever been able to explain what he means by a nation, in a way that could be used as a basis for practical politics…. The principle of the national state is not only inapplicable but it has never been clearly conceived. It is a myth. It is an irrational, a romantic and Utopian dream, a dream of naturalism and of tribal collectivism….

 

In spite of its inherent reactionary and irrational tendencies, modern nationalism, strangely enough, was in its short history before Hegel, a revolutionary and liberal creed. By something like an historical accident – the invasion of German lands by the first national army, the French army under Napoleon, and the reaction caused by this event – it had made its way into the camp of freedom. It is not without interest to sketch the history of this development, and of the way in which Hegel brought nationalism back into the totalitarian camp where it had belonged from the time when Plato first maintained that Greeks are related to barbarians like masters to slaves.

 

Plato, it will be remembered, unfortunately formulated his fundamental political problem by asking: Who should rule? Whose will should be law? Before Rousseau, the usual answer to this question was: The prince. Rousseau gave a new and most revolutionary answer. Not the prince, he maintained, but the people should rule; not the will of one man but the will of all…. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, selections from pgs. 49 – 58, quoted in Revealing Division)

What Popper is showing us… is that the concept of the ‘modern state’ has no role for us… for ‘we-the-people’… that the concept of the ‘modern state’ is founded in fear of the people – for here we see the man – Hegel – who, in some sense, presented the totalitarian re-working of ‘the nation’ as a sycophantic gift to the so-called ‘masters’… the man who was tasked with the mission to strip any hint of freedom from the concept of ‘nationalism’… and the ‘modern state’… we see his teachings still busy ‘state’-legitimating to this day – this is still what’s taught… to the future statesmen… – “Democracy, in nineteenth-century usage, meant taking popular sovereignty seriously. The notables were not, and have never been, ready to do this. It was the realization of this new reality that would give birth to that extraordinary invention of the nineteenth century – the political ideology…” – [‘Innovation’?… really?… he’s forgetting Plato’s Uncle Critias… so we’ve had political ideology to justify ‘rule’ for some time now… – P.S.] “The problem for the notables, therefore, was how to construct a structure that would seem to be popular and in fact was not, but would nonetheless retain the support of a significant proportion of the ‘people’…”

 

What Popper is showing us… is that the concept of the ‘modern state’ has no role for us… for ‘we-the-people’…

 

…that the concept of the ‘modern state’ is founded in fear of the people – for here we see the man – Hegel – who, in some sense, presented the totalitarian re-working of ‘the nation’ as a sycophantic gift to the so-called ‘masters’… the man who was tasked with the mission to strip any hint of freedom from the concept of ‘nationalism’… and the ‘modern state’… we see his teachings still busy ‘state’-legitimating to this day – this is still what’s taught… to the future statesmen.

 

And as we read the following excerpt – from a book in which Wallerstein examines the same period (in the development of the ‘modern world-system’…) that Martin Bernal is looking at in Black Athena when he talks about the creation of the mythology of ‘Ancient Greece’ and shows how it was installed in elite institutions of ‘higher learning’ – I don't think this ‘co-incidence’ is a coincidence – I ask that we ask ourselves, “are we still stuck there… in the ‘master’s fear… or are we ready to discuss it… and move on?”

Construction of the modern state, located within and constrained by an inter-state system, had been a constituent element of the modern world-system from its beginnings in the long sixteenth century. The concern of rulers had been to strengthen the state in two ways: to strengthen its authority – that is, its capacity to make efficacious decisions within its frontiers; and to strengthen its world power – that is, its capacity to impose its will on other states and diminish their possibility of doing the converse. There had long been much debate about the proper distribution of decision making within the state: how much of it should be concentrated in the head of state as sovereign, how much shared with legislative bodies. For three centuries, however, the debate remained one of distribution of power among branches of government. It is true that in 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in the name of “we, the people”, but it was not at all clear (even to the signers of this declaration) how seriously one was to take the idea of popular sovereignty, and what its implications were. For the world-system as a whole, it was “the French Revolution [that] let the genie out of the bottle. After 1789 it was impossible to keep political debate within a privileged circle of propertied interest” (Evans, 1983, 66). The French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath made the concept of popular sovereignty one with which every government in the modern world had to come to terms, and none more so than the governments of the two rivals for hegemonic power [France and England]. The question in 1815 was whether 1789 – 1815 was merely a sort of revolutionary interlude, to be interred by a “Restoration” and a “Tory reaction,” or whether the concept of popular sovereignty would have an enduring political impact. To the surprise of the restorers of global order, it was an idea that had taken deeper root than they had realized. They could not inter it, whatever they wished. The specter that haunted the notables was that of democracy. The distinction between the liberal state and democracy was, in Max Beloff’s words, “the most important distinction in nineteenth-century politics.” Democracy, in nineteenth-century usage, meant taking popular sovereignty seriously. The notables were not, and have never been, ready to do this. It was the realization of this new reality that would give birth to that extraordinary invention of the nineteenth century – the political ideology.

 

[‘Innovation’?… really?… he’s forgetting Plato’s Uncle Critias… so we’ve had political ideology to justify ‘rule’ for some time now… – P.S.]

 

In 1789, no one really knew what transferring sovereignty from the monarch to the people really meant. They thought it had something to do with limiting the arbitrary power of the executive authority associated with the concept of an absolute monarch. And so it did, but that done, there was still the need to find a legitimation for the decisions of passing coalitions of sundry political leaders. Taking seriously the slogan of popular sovereignty has seemed ever since to all those with effective political power to be threatening, to suggest the unpleasant prospect of submission to the vagaries of uninformed capricious masses. The problem for the notables, therefore, was how to construct a structure that would seem to be popular and in fact was not, but would nonetheless retain the support of a significant proportion of the “people.” That would not be easy. The liberal state was to be the historic solution. (Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789 – 1914 (2011), p. 22 – 3

It is this notion of ‘world order’ or the ‘global-state’ that must be wrestled with… perhaps… for us to stand together on this opening page of… and claim… our future – what we need to be discussing is our future! What else is there to talk about?… the Internet has altered the calculus of ‘power’ – its formula for our containment – today we are able to see… in real time and very concretely… the lie of it… ‘power’s propaganda… and are taking concrete steps… to overcome the heretofore devastating (for our solidarity… our unity…) effects… of centuries of atomization.

 

It is this notion of ‘world order’ or the ‘global-state’ that must be wrestled with… perhaps… for us to stand together on this opening page of… and claim… our future.

 

I recall saying… half-way jesting… part dead-serious… of what was then Wallerstein’s new book (the excerpt of which we just read) to the friend who’d planned the conference I attended… back then: “it’s about the French Revolution or some such thing… when what we need to be discussing is our future!… what else is there to talk about?…” i.e., getting clear on an ‘opposite’… and working tirelessly to get it.

 

But perhaps Wallerstein is right to… per Bentham’s advice… reveal exactly what we got… so that we have our legs beneath us when we jump…

 

…and… in the sad event we blow this chance to throw off the presumptions of the so-called ‘masters’… then his book stands (or rather hobbles… with the weight of – what would be then – a guaranteed suppression on its back…) – stands as a challenge to the guaranteed propaganda-teaching they will give to future youth… who will be taught to stand in awe of such as Kissinger –

 

…but on the other hand… as far as “standing righteously against the conditioning they call ‘education’ given youth” goes… we have Popper… and look what ‘power’ did to him…

 

…so…

 

…what we need to be discussing is our future! What else is there to talk about?

 

‘Power’ has ever viewed us as “uninformed capricious masses”… and then set about constructing the strictures and enforcing the practices – using our ‘organized-by-them’ own energy – that would seem to serve as evidence for this assessment… and, most importantly, serve to make us seem so to ourselves…

 

…and… kept in separate boxes… kept from our own natural tendency toward conglomeration… our stubborn resistance to this pejorative picture of ourselves has been as individuals… and the ‘non-culture of child abandonment’ has reinforced this individual form… reinforced the propaganda…

 

…but… today is different… the Internet has altered the calculus of ‘power’ – its formula for our containment – today we are able to see… in real time and very concretely… the lie of it… ‘power’s propaganda… and are taking concrete steps… to overcome the heretofore devastating (for our solidarity… our unity…) effects… of centuries of atomization.

 

–––

 

At the risk of seeming to belabor the point… …let’s consider for a minute the implications of the state having both the capability of secretly assaulting and incapacitating dissent… battering it until it ceases and desists… and using it… – what would this mean for the possibilities for humanity… for the quality of human beings… if those who have the courage to resist the bullyishness of states… are whisked away… with the means never seen… hidden in silence… and never any opposition posed to it – is this not a Plato’s Tribe wet dream? – (and by the by… these guys – these global-state statesmen – deeply believe they are the ‘smart ones’… deservedly in charge… because they’ve been able to harness our energy… our creative force – is this not loony? – like believing you’re fast because you ‘own’ a racehorse…) – But whether you consider this an actual threat that must be credited or not… what must be given credit is that the thoughts expressed on these pages are suppressed… as there could not be more needed thoughts… in this moment… for our discussion… than those contributed by ancestors we never hear of… Karl Popper, Alice Miller, John Boswell, Miklos Nyiszli, Sebastian de Grazia… – And is it clear that this is not about race… but rather passification?… the state demanding obedience… so it can ‘govern’?… and a system of ‘power’ designed to keep us divided…

 

At the risk of seeming to belabor the point… I ask that you assume that what I’m saying is true… that I’m being tracked… targeted… blasted… through some use of microwave radiation… or through some weaponization of magnetic fields…

 

…if this is indeed what’s happening… let’s consider for a minute the implications of it…

 

…of the state having both the capability of secretly assaulting and incapacitating dissent… battering it until it ceases and desists…

 

…and using it…

 

– what would this mean for the possibilities for humanity… for the quality of human beings… if those who have the courage to resist the bullyishness of states… are whisked away… with the means never seen… hidden in silence… and never any opposition posed to it – is this not a Plato’s Tribe wet dream? – never any opposition to worry ‘power’s little mind…

(…and by the by… these guys – these global-state statesmen – deeply believe they are the ‘smart ones’… deservedly in charge… because they’ve been able to harness our energy… our creative force – is this not loony? – like believing you’re fast because you ‘own’ a racehorse…)

 

(…“Expert at bullyishness”… what a skill-set!… it never served the earth… never served us… look what devastation it wrought… thousands and thousands of years of suffering laid at its feet… to say that it’s not needed for our future is not gross understating but stating rather a horrific irrelevance…)

But whether you consider this an actual threat that must be credited or not… what must be given credit is that the thoughts expressed on these pages are suppressed… as there could not be more needed thoughts… in this moment… for our discussion… than those contributed by ancestors we never hear of… Karl Popper, Alice Miller, John Boswell, Miklos Nyiszli, Sebastian de Grazia… most certainly top the list – the folks who either expose ‘power’ like Miklos and Popper… Karl Popper… who revealed the roots of ‘power’s totalitarian beliefs in Plato… and Alice Miller who, with John Boswell, shows the history of abandonment beneath the disaster of ‘rule’… or those like Sebastian de Grazia who unmask key myths like “labor is our inevitable lot…” or the myths of ‘scarcity’… and our supposed ‘inherent violence’ or division.

 

And is it clear that this is not about race… but rather passification?… the state demanding obedience… so it can ‘govern’?… and a system of ‘power’ designed to keep us divided…

 

I listened recently to an account of a former Mississippi Freedom Rider… a black man… contributing to the radio broadcast The Moth… I listened to him tell the story of being thrown in jail… knowing death was breathing down his neck… and then one day witnessing a ten-year old boy… a white child… being tossed in the cell neighboring….

 

He watched that child being subjected to punishments of increasing severity as the child resisted… refused to bend his neck to Authority…

 

…‘power’ would call him an ‘intractable brute’… we… of course… would call him… a martyr… (I almost wrote ‘angel’… because that quality of courage is so other-worldly….)

 

That child… said the Freedom Rider… and the fate he suffered… showed him the truth… that the problem wasn’t ‘race’… but a system of ‘power’ that was determined to make us bend to its definitions… its definitions of us… and yes that is a stratified set… differential reward and punishment: some ‘strats’ get strokes… others… straps…

 

…and yes… that does make unity a challenge… as it was intended to… and certainly our internalization of these designations – designed by ‘power’ – our unconscious embodiment of their scheming… does complicate things…

 

…but knowing a conscious plan exists means we can mate our thoughts and actions to its exact opposite.

 

Recall our Shakespeare quote: “All difficulties are but easy when they are known.”

 

–––

 

No one knew what it meant to abandon children… to not surround them with love… attention… and complete acceptance…

 

…but now we do… and must accept the mantle of that ‘knowing’… and step up… to guarantee our future.

 

And… trust… to wrestle with the real hate-full ‘Aliens’ – alien to Love – of the world… and not the fake ones – those fake… constructed (by ‘power’…) buffers to keep us divided – is such a blessing… for to live one’s life entrapped in some Tribe’s suffocating fancy… their false construction… is an abomination before open… free… and generous… Life.

 

–––

 

[Continuing with Chapter 17 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Jewish Flight”… – P.S.]

–––

 

…the Americans… exercised considerable diplomatic pressure on the British to get them to accept 100,000 Jews in Palestine, despite the fact that they themselves officially allowed only 12,849 Jews into America under President Truman’s special DP directive… The British were the only ones who tried to stem the flow of Jews from the east… In the summer of 1946, Zionists began a campaign of terror against the British in Palestine (a campaign that was the main cause of the rise of anti-Semitism in postwar Britain). The following year the British started to scale down their military presence in Jerusalem. At the end of November 1947, after intensive lobbying by Zionists, the United Nations voted to award part of Palestine to the Jews for the formation of their own state. And finally, in 1948, after a close-run civil war between the Jews and Arab Palestinians, the state of Israel was consolidated. The Jews were free to make one small corner of the world their own…

 

[“Where did all the Jews go?… when they were violently ejected by the global-state-statesmen from Europe – in their rush to install ‘One Nation Per Land’” – was the question asked last week… the answer… we learned… was that: – P.S.] by far the majority wanted to go to Palestine….

 

They were helped in this aim by just about every nation apart from Britain. The Soviets, who were perfectly happy for their Jews to flee Europe, did not place obstacles in their way and opened their borders for Jews – but only Jews – to exit. The Poles and the Hungarians, as we have seen, did whatever they could to make life for Jews uncomfortable, and again encouraged them to leave by any means possible. The Romanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Italians and French all provided ports for Jews to embark on ships bound for the Holy Land, and rarely made any effort to stop them. But it was the Americans who helped the Jews most of all – not by allowing them to come to the United States, but by facilitating their journey towards British-controlled Palestine. They exercised considerable diplomatic pressure on the British to get them to accept 100,000 Jews in Palestine, despite the fact that they themselves officially allowed only 12,849 Jews into America under President Truman’s special DP directive.

 

The British were the only ones who tried to stem the flow of Jews from the east. They pointed out that the vast majority were not survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps, but Jews who had spent the war in Kazakhstan and other areas of the Soviet Union. Since it was now supposedly ‘safe’ for them to return to their home towns, the British did not see why they should be the ones to provide sanctuary for them – the Soviet Union and the countries of eastern Europe should also be doing their fair share. While they were happy to provide shelter for Hitler’s victims in Germany, they drew the line at welcoming a new wave of Jewish refugees that had little to do with the war. Unlike the Americans, they refused these new Jews entry to the DP camps under their control.

 

The British believed – wrongly, as it turns out – that this new wave of Jewish refugees was inspired not by fear of anti-Semitism but by Zionists who had traveled from Israel to eastern Europe in order to agitate for recruits to their cause. In fairness to the British, the Brichah movement was indeed made up mostly of Palestinian Zionists – but they were entirely mistaken in their assumption that the new desire to flee to Palestine had originated with them. As historians like Yehuda Bauer have conclusively shown, the impetus to flee came exclusively from the refugees themselves: all the Zionists were doing was providing them with a place to aim for.

 

The British also argued passionately that it was morally wrong, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to allow the flight of European Jews towards Palestine. According to the Foreign Office, it was ‘surely a counsel of despair… indeed it would go far by implication to admit that [the] Nazis were right in holding that there was no place for Jews in Europe’. The British Foreign Secretary himself, Ernest Bevin, strongly believed that ‘there had been no point in fighting the Second World War if the Jews could not stay on in Europe where they had a vital role to play in the reconstruction of that continent’.

 

For all their appeals to moral philosophy, the real reasons behind British reluctance were political: they did not want to create a potentially explosive situation between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. But without the robust cooperation of any of their partners in Europe there was not really much they could do to prevent the westward flight from continuing. Their efforts to prevent Jews from arriving in Palestine were a little more successful, and ships in the Mediterranean carrying tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants were boarded by the Royal Navy and redirected to special DP camps in Cyprus.

 

But this was merely a case of King Canute trying to hold back the tide – in the end there was little the British could do to stop the course of events […called ‘U.S. determination’… – P.S.] In the summer of 1946, Zionists began a campaign of terror against the British in Palestine (a campaign that was the main cause of the rise of anti-Semitism in postwar Britain). The following year the British started to scale down their military presence in Jerusalem. At the end of November 1947, after intensive lobbying by Zionists, the United Nations voted to award part of Palestine to the Jews for the formation of their own state. And finally, in 1948, after a close-run civil war between the Jews and Arab Palestinians, the state of Israel was consolidated. The Jews were free to make one small corner of the world their own.

[Considering the propagated media-version’s divergence from the actual history: isn’t this a testament to the power of ‘power’s control of the media… control of the educational system… control of the message… control of what thoughts get out there – that… I would bet you… the vast majority of folks in the U.S. are not aware of how recently (and under what circumstances…) the Israeli state was established… and that if these same events that happened to the Palestinians happened to them… they would never accept it… not for a minute… particularly… as the Palestinian historian we’re about to read says: “the Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust… why should they be made to pay for it?” – P.S.]

“Suffice to say that the Jews were presented with an opportunity that was too great to pass up…” [And… again… remember who presented them with that ‘opportunity’– the U.S…. and why? Oil… – that’s how it’s always been, right? (under ‘class’…) for ‘power’: strategic control of the resources in order to play the game of ‘Supremacy’ successfully. It’s not about ‘oil’ because of the dollars… it’s about ‘oil’ because of the strategic importance of it. Wasn’t it Kissinger who said, “Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” – P.S.] “Given their recent history, one can hardly blame them for wishing to create their own state, even if, in the words of one Palestinian historian, the Arabs ‘failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust’. For better or worse, huge numbers of European Jews at last found themselves in a country where they themselves were the masters…”[…and here we see a good illustration of the ‘Mr. Smith Virus’ (discussed in Waking Up…) – they got vampire-bit – they were now the ‘masters’… and… again… we need Alice Miller to understand this… she explains the psychological dynamic of it… of needing to be the ‘master’… that it begins in infancy… under the ‘class’-system… – P.S.]

 

This is not the place to embark on a discussion of the brutal conflict that has existed between Israelis and Arabs ever since that time, and which continues to fill our newspapers today. Suffice to say that the Jews were presented with an opportunity that was too great to pass up.…

[And… again… remember who presented them with that ‘opportunity’– the U.S…. and why? Oil… – that’s how it’s always been, right? (under ‘class’…) for ‘power’: strategic control of the resources in order to play the game of ‘Supremacy’ successfully. It’s not about ‘oil’ because of the dollars… it’s about ‘oil’ because of the strategic importance of it. Wasn’t it Kissinger who said, “Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” – P.S.]

…Given their recent history, one can hardly blame them for wishing to create their own state, even if, in the words of one Palestinian historian [Walid Khalidi, quoted in Shephard, Long Road Home], the Arabs ‘failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust’. For better or worse, huge numbers of European Jews at last found themselves in a country where they themselves were the masters […and here we see a good illustration of the ‘Mr. Smith Virus’ (discussed in Waking Up…) – they got vampire-bit – they were now the ‘masters’… and… again… we need Alice Miller to understand this… she explains the psychological dynamic of it… of needing to be the ‘master’… that it begins in infancy… under the ‘class’-system… – P.S.] where they could not be persecuted, and where they would be allowed to follow their own agenda. Israel was not only the promised land, but a land of promise.

 

As a result of this process, however, the areas of Europe where the Jews had once lived were irrevocably changed. Poland in particular was almost unrecognizable from the cultural and ethnic melting pot it had been before the war. To a lesser extent, the same was true of the whole of eastern Europe.

 

By 1948 much of the region had become, even more than in Hitler’s time, Judenfrei.

 

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* Chapter 18… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Francisco Goya’s Third of May, (1808, Portion)]

 

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“If the survivors of the Holocaust were correct to insist that they had been singled out during the war, this was no longer the case after the war was over. Jews were certainly mistreated, as I have shown, but after the liberation the true focus of nationalist violence now fell on other minorities…” […‘One Nation Per Land’ – with Plato held up as authority… – P.S.] “One need only compare the events at Kielce with what happened in other parts of Poland that same year. At the end of January 1946, soldiers from the Polish 34th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Stanislav Pluto surrounded the village of Zawadka Morochowska (or ‘Zavadka Morochivska’ in Ukrainian), near Sanok in south-east Poland. The village was inhabited entirely by ethnic Ukrainians, and it was their ethnicity that was the sole reason for the events that took place there. According to eyewitnesses, the arrival of the army heralded a massacre that was every bit as bloody as anything that had happened during the war…”

 

The Jews were not the only people to be chased out of their home towns in the aftermath of the war. Nor were they the only ones to suffer violence from mobs, policemen and armed militias. If the survivors of the Holocaust were correct to insist that they had been singled out during the war, this was no longer the case after the war was over. Jews were certainly mistreated, as I have shown, but after the liberation the true focus of nationalist violence now fell on other minorities.

 

[…‘One Nation Per Land’ – with Plato held up as authority… – P.S.]

 

One need only compare the events at Kielce with what happened in other parts of Poland that same year. At the end of January 1946, soldiers from the Polish 34th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Stanislav Pluto surrounded the village of Zawadka Morochowska (or ‘Zavadka Morochivska’ in Ukrainian), near Sanok in south-east Poland. The village was inhabited entirely by ethnic Ukrainians, and it was their ethnicity that was the sole reason for the events that took place there. According to eyewitnesses, the arrival of the army heralded a massacre that was every bit as bloody as anything that had happened during the war:

They came to the village at dawn. All the men began to run to the woods, and those who remained attempted to hide in the attics and cellars but to no avail. The Polish soldiers were looking everywhere so that not a single place was left unsearched. Whenever they captured a man, he was killed instantly; where they could not find a man, they beat the women and children… My father was hidden in the attic and the Poles ordered my mother to climb up the ladder to search for him. These orders were accompanied by severe rifle-butt blows. When mother started to climb, the ladder suddenly broke and she fell down, breaking her elbow. Five Poles began to beat her again with rifle-butts and when she could not lift herself, they kicked her with their heavy boots. I ran to her with my four-year-old daughter and wanted to shield her, but the soldiers began to beat me and my child. I soon fell unconscious and awoke to find my mother and child killed and the entire village afire!

When Ukrainian partisans arrived in the area the next day they discovered a scene of utter devastation: ‘nothing but smouldering ruins and a few moving shadows that looked more like ghosts than human beings’. Apart from looting the village comprehensively, and stealing most of the livestock, Polish soldiers had killed dozens of the villagers, most of them women and children.…

 

“Worse than the fact of their murders was the manner in which they were committed…” [To revenge oneself at last… for the crime of one’s own vile return of pain and sadness… for all the love you brought… to be the one to own that seeming ‘power’… its semblance… may serve a perverse satisfaction… if one’s soul was lost long ago… and only rage was left… nothing of ‘joy’ would I attach to this… not a bit of it… just knee-jerk reaction to an unknown cost: one’s own abandonment… – P.S.]

 

…Polish soldiers had killed dozens of the villagers, most of them women and children. Worse than the fact of their murders was the manner in which they were committed. Many were beaten to death, disemboweled, or set on fire. Some women had their breasts sliced off while others had their eyes gouged out or their noses and tongues removed. According to one of the Polish soldiers who took part in the massacre, ‘there were some among us who were enjoying this butchery’.

[To revenge oneself at last… for the crime of one’s own vile return of pain and sadness… for all the love you brought… to be the one to own that seeming ‘power’… its semblance… may serve a perverse satisfaction… if one’s soul was lost long ago… and only rage was left… nothing of ‘joy’ would I attach to this… not a bit of it… just knee-jerk reaction to an unknown cost: one’s own abandonment… – P.S.]

Most of the historical sources for this massacre come from the Ukrainian side, which had a vested interest in portraying Polish brutality, but even allowing for a certain degree of embellishment it was an undeniably horrific event. Neither did it end there. Two months later the army returned to Zawadka Morochowska and instructed all the surviving inhabitants to gather their things and cross the border into Soviet Ukraine. All the remaining buildings apart from the school and the church were torched and, as a warning of what awaited the villagers if they stayed, a group of eleven men were shot. Finally, in April, after several more villagers had been killed, the church and the school were also destroyed, and the entire population was rounded up and forcibly expelled from the country. During the course of these operations some fifty-six people had been murdered, and many others horribly wounded. The village was all but wiped from the map.

 

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* “WUR of October 19th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercials’ I’m planning:]

 

“Organizational forms are mated to the task at hand… and what are our tasks… those of we-the-people… at this moment in the human story?…”

 

“Remember… this ain’t about nobody forcing nobody… we don’t want your stuff… trust. That’s the point… there is abundance. There’s enough for all. Spend some time with the earth and she’ll show you. But we need our global-interconnections to actually realize that possibility… that potential… if for no other reason than that ‘power’ has created so much havoc…”

 

“It seems to me what we’re talking about is a globally-interconnected network of villages… land gifted to folks who want to engage in this effort to design a future without force…”

 

Today's show:

 

( – My archival show files at the radio station have been deleted – so goes it – with hidden malevolences – ) Let the absence stand for ‘proof’… what should be there in branch and root… and is not… if not… germinating thought… in every one of us… – and by the by… re: having our brothers and sisters backs… globally… have you noticed this tactic that ‘power’ uses through its control of the media: of scaling our attention (and ultimately concern) back as they scale back their coverage?

 

October 13th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: What… ‘networks’… what… ‘language’… what… ‘thoughts’… what ‘forums’… what ‘circles’… what ‘tribes’… what ‘discussions’ or ‘agreements’… must exist… that we don’t have yet… that would allow us to have the back of such courage as we’re seeing in Hong Kong as we speak?

(…and we’re hearing a little bit less as we speak… and that’s an old tactic of ‘power’… because they control the media. They start out saying, “See, we don’t censor…” and then they slowly reduce the coverage… and because – and we’re going to be talking about this… it’s a tactic of the Panopticon – because we’ve been conditioned to let them hold our attention… and because we need the ‘communal voice’ (our reference to the thoughts held by ‘the communal’… the communal version of ourselves…) as the ‘power’-controlled media scales back – there must be a name for this tactic –…

 

…as that communal reference… which they control… called ‘the media’… as its ‘coverage’ gets scaled back – as they slowly reduce their attention to something… – through a natural empathic process… we find our own interest… subtly… getting scaled back. And so we have to consciously recognize these tactics when they happen.

 

And… above all… we gotta start having “our own things”: our own vision… our own goals… our own media… our own means of talking to each other…)

So we have to back our brothers and sisters globally who are standing up to… in essence… the ‘global state’. And how do we back them if not by withholding our energy from ‘the system’? And is not the difficulty of our saying this out loud and planning it… of our seeing ourselves as ‘global actors’… ‘proof’ of the successful containment of our energy in ‘state-boxes’ (and we’re going to be talking today about what that means… for our ability to grow as human beings… which is our right… as life…)

Let the absence stand for ‘proof’…

…what should be there in branch and root… and is not…

…if not… germinating thought…

…in every one of us.

 

So… what is your explanation?

You have none?

Let the absence stand for ‘proof’…

…there is enormous human suppression.

 

And of it not a whit of discussion…

…by whose ‘will’ was this accomplished?

Four thousand years ago they’d say “capricious Fate”…

 

Let the absence stand for ‘proof’:

…the problem’s ‘rule’…

…over each and every one of us…

…and that it’s ‘total’ (-global) means it’s set up so.

 

And what I’ve learned… from the universe…

…is that our first move out of that ‘total-set-up-so’…

…our first reaching out of hands to her…

…is met…

…she pulls us to the ‘all-of-it’…

 

So that’s our challenge…

…taking that first step…

…as all else flows from it.

George Eliot said, “what do we live for if not to make life less difficult to each other…” and I would add… that we can only do that fundamentally… by ending ‘power’ – ultimately – because they can manufacture difficulty ad infinitum… this is why I take issue with ‘journalism’… because they congratulate themselves on uncovering horror after horror… never mentioning that ‘power’ is busy apace making more for them to uncover. This is called ‘getting nowhere’. It is we-the-people who are going to have to take responsibility for the evolution of humanity itself…

 

Is it clear that only fully-developing thought in every one of us is an effective check to concentrated ‘power’… because concentrated ‘power’ only exists by concentrating our energy. Let’s consider again the concept of ‘the nation’ in this light… by continuing our dip into Wallerstein’s analysis of it:

In 1815, looking back on the long adventure from 1789 to 1815, in terms of internal social tensions in France and Great Britain, what did one see? Michel Vovelle said of an essay of his about the French Revolution that it would be pretentious to entitle it “the birth of a nation” and that instead, “more modestly,” he would call it “the discovery of politics.” But is this different? What else do we mean by a nation except that within which the pursuit of politics by its nationals is considered to be legitimate? In a profound sense, the sovereignty of the people is a concept that incarnates the legitimacy of politics. And therefore the debate about the implementation of this concept is a debate about the limits of the political – not only about who may be involved and how they may be involved, but also about what matters are subject to the collective decision of the nation. France, in this sense, had a rude beginning as a nation. But so did the rest of Europe. For, in effect, “the invader” Napoleon “with his ideas of emancipation and social liberation… spread the concept of the nation” (Ponteil, 1968) and spread with it France’s rude beginnings. The question for France, as for all the other new nations, became what difference the politics of a nation would make for the lives of ordinary people, as opposed to their lives when politics did not exist and decisions were subject to the intrigues of a court. It was intended to make a profound difference. Still, there are those who would come to view the Revolution, as did Elton (1923) as having been “primarily a movement for order; a movement against chaos.” In that case, one could say of Napoleon (but not only of him) “indifferently that he ‘organized the ancien regime’ or that he consolidated the Revolution: for the two processes were identical” (Elton). (Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789 – 1914 (2011), p. 23 – 24)

(…“a movement for order…” – abandoned children performing unconscious service to the paterfamilias of lost children: Plato?… we’ll return to this question when we look at Kissinger.)

 

And while there is an embedded definition here of ‘politics’ – as beginning with the fall of the absolutist monarchies – it doesn’t help us to view it that narrowly.

 

In Waking Up I defined ‘political power’ as “…the ability to induce others to labor (while exempting yourself…)”

(George Eliot said, “what do we live for if not to make life less difficult to each other…” and I would add… that we can only do that fundamentally… by ending ‘power’ – ultimately – because they can manufacture difficulty ad infinitum… this is why I take issue with ‘journalism’… because they congratulate themselves on uncovering horror after horror… never mentioning that ‘power’ is busy apace making more for them to uncover. This is called ‘getting nowhere’. It is we-the-people who are going to have to take responsibility for the evolution of humanity itself…)

In Waking Up I defined ‘political power’ as “…the ability to induce others to labor (while exempting yourself…)” Now… ‘historically’… the pursuit of this ‘exemption’ (from being controlled by ‘power’… which none of us like…) has… under ‘class’… generally been undertaken individually – for when it takes the collective shape… down on it hard comes the ‘power’ of ‘the state’. ‘The state’ wants no contestation re: its exclusive claim to our collective energy…. ‘The state’s sanction of collective action limits action’s scope… and so its effect… So by claiming the exclusive right to direct our collective energy… ‘the state’ ensures we cannot challenge our containment – it’s a set-up… a circular trap. And as ‘collective subjects’… our thought remains conformist – because there are no alternative thoughts to think within that framework – and it cannot develop – which it wants to do (so we have to trust that… build on that. That’s our ace-in-the-hole – one of them… we got a few… like ‘honesty’… we can tell the truth… and in a manufactured world of lies everywhere… everywhere we turn… everything we see… – we have honesty… that’s an advantage.)

 

In Waking Up I defined ‘political power’ as “…the ability to induce others to labor (while exempting yourself…)” Now… ‘historically’… the pursuit of this ‘exemption’ (from being controlled by ‘power’… which none of us like…) has… under ‘class’… generally been undertaken individually – this relates to an observation made last week… that, “our stubborn resistance to the pejorative picture of ourselves as ‘uninformed capricious masses’… has taken individual form…” – i.e. ‘the state’ sanctions it – for when it takes the collective shape… down on it hard comes the ‘power’ of ‘the state’. ‘The state’ wants no contestation re: its exclusive claim to our collective energy…. ‘The state’s sanction of collective action limits action’s scope… and so its effect. By claiming ‘collective action’ as its exclusive prerogative (and I hope folks know what I mean by that: when they herd us into the activities and the projects that they define for us… that is creating collective energy… but under their control…) So by claiming the exclusive right to direct our collective energy… ‘the state’ ensures we cannot challenge our containment – it’s a set-up… a circular trap. And as ‘collective subjects’… our thought remains conformist – because there are no alternative thoughts to think within that framework – and it cannot develop – which it wants to do (so we have to trust that… build on that. That’s our ace-in-the-hole – one of them… we got a few… like ‘honesty’… we can tell the truth… and in a manufactured world of lies everywhere… everywhere we turn… everything we see… – we have honesty… that’s an advantage.)

 

‘Democracy’ as legitimating ideology defines ‘legitimate politics’… thereby containing our political activity”…. We’ve known for some time that Plato advised statesmen on how to “keep the cattle herded…” but we’ve never been able to discuss how that happens. We’re not allowed that discussion. We have to take charge of that discussion… as well as the discussion: “clarifying that the difference between a world based in uncoerced work… and a society that claims it is ‘socialist’… solely rests in one being without… the other with… ‘the state’”. This is an important discussion so we can get clear: is it true that what we want is ‘socialism’… or ‘participatory democracy’? And so honing in on ‘the state’… and what that means… and what that is… and ‘how do we develop fully as human beings if there is a state?’… and what is our priority as living things – these are discussions that clarify… help us refine… our picture of what we want for our future.

 

So… several themes or discussions are converging as we examine this notion of ‘the nation’:

 

…“‘the state’ as the set of legitimating practices that incarnates ‘obedience’… or ‘rule’”…

 

…“the notion of ‘world order’ undergirds the legitimating ideology of ‘democracy’… and all ‘political’ ideologies”…

 

‘Democracy’ as legitimating ideology defines ‘legitimate politics’… thereby containing our political activity”…. We’ve known for some time that Plato advised statesmen on how to “keep the cattle herded…” but we’ve never been able to discuss how that happens. We’re not allowed that discussion. We have to take charge of that discussion. It’s a critical one.

 

…“clarifying that the difference between a world based in uncoerced work… and a society that claims it is ‘socialist’… solely rests in one being without… the other with… ‘the state’.” This is an important discussion so that we can get clear: is it true that what we want is ‘socialism’… or ‘participatory democracy’? And so honing in on ‘the state’… and what that means… and what that is… and ‘how do we develop fully as human beings if there is a state?’… and what is our priority as living things – these are discussions that clarify… help us refine… our picture of what we want for our future.

 

And so we’re back again to our other discussions: “‘the state’ exists to ensure our obedience… and to police the limits of political action…. Put like that… is what we want for our future another ‘state’?… another set of ‘masters’?… or do we want to be free?… like the birds… just like the birds – ‘loving ourselves’… let’s put some substance in that saccharine phrase that the psychological… therapeutic (healing)… industries use ad nauseum… to disguise the reality that we have a system of ‘class’ that is antagonistic to our being ‘fully-developing living things’ – and we understandably resist that… and so then the therapeutic industries that serve ‘power’ rush in to explain for us… help us ‘understand’ “why you’re… ‘challenging Authority’ like that” – that the reason lies anywhere and everywhere but with ‘power’… a system of ‘rule’ that is illegitimate.

 

We have been arguing… to paraphrase Audre Lorde… “the master’s words will never dismantle the master’s house…” …what’s exciting, however, is that we now know… that words will dismantle it. So it is reclaiming our thoughts… disconnecting from that ‘master’s voice… that gets us back our world. That’s exciting! Because we have global means of communicating with each other. If words will dismantle the ‘master’s house… and we have instantaneous global communication to transmit those words… it is within reach… it is within our ability to achieve – not phony ‘freedom’… not the kind where the ‘suits’ change… but actual individual freedom… because it is only individual freedom (from necessity… from compulsion of any kind…) for every human being that will dismantle concentrated ‘power’… – big discussion. (And on this issue of getting necessary discussions going: the film production resource we have locally [for me… however… having the ability to share produced videos on cable-TV has been a theoretical boon… my small PSAs are not getting ‘ingested’ – the process of uploading them to a site from which they can then get scheduled… could it be that Comcast is censoring me?… They don't want us to have anything that’s our own… we need our own things… media tops the list…]

 

Delving into the mind of Wallerstein… as we have been… is… in some sense… a negotiation with conventional usages (definitions…) despite his location at the most useful – honest – end of the Left-academic spectrum. But… we have been arguing… to paraphrase Audre Lorde… “the master’s words will never dismantle the master’s house…”

(…what’s exciting, however, is that we now know… that words will dismantle it. I didn’t know that before I started on this journey… entered into this… exploration… essentially… of ‘power’…. Remember that line from the film Silence of the Lambs when the Clarice character turns the table on Hannibal Lector and says, “why don’t you turn that high-powered intellect on yourself, Doctor… or maybe you’re scared to…” ‘Power’ is so busy keeping us not looking at them… maybe there’s some unpleasant truth: the history of abandonment in there they don’t want us to talk about. These are not healthy souls. Just the opposite.… So it is reclaiming our thoughts… disconnecting from that ‘master’s voice… that gets us back our world. That’s exciting! Because we have global means of communicating with each other. If words will dismantle the ‘master’s house… and we have instantaneous global communication to transmit those words… it is within reach… it is within our ability to achieve – not phony ‘freedom’… not the kind where the ‘suits’ change… but actual individual freedom… because it is only individual freedom (from necessity… from compulsion of any kind…) for every human being that will dismantle concentrated ‘power’… – big discussion.

And on this issue of getting necessary discussions going: the film production resource we have locally [for me… however… a theoretical boon… my small PSAs are not getting ‘ingested’ – the process of uploading them to a site from which they can then get scheduled… (could it be that Comcast is censoring me?…) inspires me to invite those who are interested in having and sharing… on video… some key discussions for forwarding our future… to please get in touch.

 

(And on this issue of getting necessary discussions going: the film production resource we have locally [for me… however… having the ability to share produced videos on cable-TV has been a theoretical boon… my small PSAs are not getting ‘ingested’ – the process of uploading them to a site from which they can then get scheduled… could it be that Comcast is censoring me?… They don't want us to have anything that’s our own… we need our own things… media tops the list…] inspires me to invite those who are interested in having and sharing… on video… some key discussions for forwarding our future… to please get in touch.)

When one recent Epoch Times [of September 25 – October 1, 2014] boldly splashed these words on its cover, “Chinese Student Spies Overwhelm U.S.”… implied in that headline is the assumption that the U.S. state is not likewise knee-deep in the similar exploitation of ‘its’ students (most of whom are likely unaware of their actions’ full scope or import…) – although not to ‘spy’ on China but rather on ‘its’ own citizens: a shadow-surveillance-state needs shadow-surveillance-denizens. (Part 1)

 

And so it was very exciting to me to really get that, “words will dismantle the master’s house…”: ‘power’. Reclaiming our words reclaims our world. Bentham saw it true… and so schooled ‘power’… but now we’re schooled too…. I don't know about you… but I never quite understood “the pen is mightier than the sword…” (until now…) – and what’s that other saying?… “those who live by the sword, die by the sword…” Well a system that lives by stealing our words… ends by our reclaiming them.)

…the ‘master’s words… terms… definitions… circular thinking… will not usher in our future…

(Is it possible to get a book published… if the subject is politics… or speak over the airwaves… if you don’t repeat oft and poignant the refrain that you’re, “worried about preserving ‘our’ democracy…”? Daily you hear it… a recent Epoch Times [of October 9 – 15, 2014] had this as a theme in at least three pieces. And I don’t this drumbeat is atypical of most media that produce political discourse – despite the fact that this paper’s focus on exposing the flesh-and-blood consequences of China’s totalitarianism serves simultaneously to cloak the U.S. ‘soft’-form (although from where I sit… it don’t feel so ‘soft’.) For instance when one recent paper [of September 25 – October 1, 2014] boldly splashed these words on its cover, “Chinese Student Spies Overwhelm U.S.”… implied in that headline is the assumption that the U.S. state is not likewise knee-deep in the similar exploitation of ‘its’ students (most of whom are likely unaware of their actions’ full scope or import…) – although not to ‘spy’ on China but rather on ‘its’ own citizens: a shadow-surveillance-state needs shadow-surveillance-denizens.…

 

The tactic Epoch Times describes: engaging large numbers with “each doing a small share of the work…” is exactly what is being done here… by the surveillance state underneath the official one – and… who knows?… perhaps that state is part of the global one. But let’s not lose sight of the stakes… a big part of which is: our children are being multiply mis-led. What are we going to do about it? Because if we don’t intervene with our clear alternative… our ‘opposite’… then we let ‘power’ tighten its hold on them… and so on our future… (Part 2)

 

…The tactic Epoch Times describes: engaging large numbers with “each doing a small share of the work…” is exactly what is being done here… by the surveillance state underneath the official one – and… who knows?… perhaps that state is part of the global one. But let’s not lose sight of the stakes… a big part of which is: our children are being multiply mis-led. What are we going to do about it? Because if we don’t intervene with our clear alternative… our ‘opposite’… then we let ‘power’ tighten its hold on them… and so on our future.

 

When we said that “the notion of ‘world order’ undergirds the legitimating ideology of ‘democracy’… and all ‘political’ ideologies”… ‘nation’ is included among them… until we reclaim its definition… Political ideologies only exist to serve ‘governance’… i.e. ‘rule’… i.e. ‘the state.’ ‘Democracy’ cycles us back… ‘nation’… in potential… allows us to stand against the ‘global-state’… the ‘world order’ of the global-state statesmen. In that first ‘non-coercion commercial’ just posted (above) the question was posed: “what are our tasks… in this moment?” And in our opening to this show we replied… by way of a start: to have Hong Kong’s back… …which can only happen… by means of a ‘staged’ ‘withdrawal’ from the ‘global-system’…

 

Mis-guided by the pundits… most of us are much mistaken about what ‘democracy’ is… and what it isn’t….)

“The master’s words will never dismantle the master’s house…” –

 

So… as I’ve done before I must take issue with Wallerstein’s terms… while simultaneously giving thanks for his helping us claim the vantage that allows us to see the way out: the vantage of ‘the world-system’…

 

(…a key next step, however, is for us to see that this system is totalitarian…)

 

When Wallerstein suggests the equivalence of these two phrases: “the birth of a nation”… and “the discovery of politics”… how does this help us understand Scotland?… or the story of “Hegel as Hit-man”… told by Popper?

 

And… in the light of Popper’s story… and the role of Hegel in service to the king of Prussia… how do we understand Wallerstein’s argument that when Napoleon spread the concept of the ‘nation’… he simultaneously spread “France’s rude beginnings…”

 

…when…

 

…we the people started out… with a very different definition… and had it betrayed… supplanted… uprooted… destroyed… destroyed by turning it to become something proto-fascist.

 

…to leave this record hidden… provides unconscious service to ‘power’… disappears them… a service academics and pundits of all sorts are all too often good for. Here’s but another illustration of an absence: our needed Popper.

 

When we said that “the notion of ‘world order’ undergirds the legitimating ideology of ‘democracy’… and all ‘political’ ideologies”… ‘nation’ is included among them… until we reclaim its definition…

 

– but that it can be reclaimed distinguishes it from other political ideologies… like ‘democracy’. As a popularly-self-determined definition it can be a functional equivalent for ‘tribe’…

 

…and ‘tribes’ can be open… and generous.

 

Political ideologies only exist to serve ‘governance’… i.e. ‘rule’… i.e. ‘the state.’ ‘Democracy’ cycles us back… ‘nation’… in potential… allows us to stand against the ‘global-state’… the ‘world order’ of the global-state statesmen.

 

In that first ‘non-coercion commercial’ just posted (above) the question was posed: “what are our tasks… in this moment?” And in our opening to this show we replied… by way of a start: to have Hong Kong’s back…

 

…which can only happen… by means of a ‘staged’ ‘withdrawal’ from the ‘global-system’…

 

–––

 

[Continuing with our reading of Chapter 18 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”… – P.S.]

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“…events in Poland were particularly important – partly because this was the country where the most comprehensive ethnic cleansing took place, but also because the Polish / Ukrainian problem had such huge consequences for the rest of Europe. It was the nationalist tensions unleashed here that finally brought the Soviets round to the idea of harnessing nationalism for their own ends – not only in Poland but in the whole of the Eastern Bloc. And it was the mutual expulsion of Poles and Ukrainians that would provide the template for ethnic cleansing throughout the continent.…” [……and… it must be reiterated… the global-state statesmen plan… and as Adam Smith said… their ‘interest’… from their self-proclaimed position of Authority means… they view events from the global vantage… and given that… we must ask… “who benefits?”… “…to the victor goes the spoils…” who benefits? Kissinger provides a hint: “In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives.” Recall Truman’s words in 1941: “…let them kill as many as possible…” – who benefits by this mindset? When will we say, “Enough is enough! We are done with it!” – P.S.]

 

The difference between the massacres at Zawadka Morochowska and the pogrom in Kielce is that the former were carried out by the army, rather than by an unruly mob. The harassment and murder of Jews in Poland was a popular phenomenon inspired by widespread anti-Semitism. It was a consequence not of government action, but of government inaction:…

[…the distinction being a matter of state-tactics… not state-unscrupulousness…

 

…and… it must be reiterated… the global-state statesmen plan… and as Adam Smith said… their ‘interest’… from their self-proclaimed position of Authority means… they view events from the global vantage… and given that… we must ask… “who benefits?”…

 

“…to the victor goes the spoils…” who benefits? Kissinger provides a hint:

 

“In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives.” (World Order, p. 20)…

 

Who benefits?

 

Recall Truman’s words in 1941: “…if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way, let them kill as many as possible…” – who benefits by this mindset? When will we say, “Enough is enough! We are done with it!” – P.S.]

…anti-Semites felt free to attack Jews because they were confident that they would not be punished for doing so. In the event, several of the perpetrators of the Kielce pogrom were tried and even executed for their crimes. The massacre of Ukrainian speakers at Zawadka Morochowska, by contrast, followed on directly from official government policy. The army had been sent to south-east Poland specifically to get rid of the Ukrainian population there. Unlike the Jews, who were merely ‘encouraged’ to flee, Ukrainians were deliberately chased out – and when they refused to go, were killed or forcibly removed. If, as at Zawadka Morochowska, the army was somewhat over-zealous in its actions, it was not, generally speaking, sanctioned for them. The most important thing, from the government’s point of view, was that they were successful.

 

Zawadka Morochowska was just one event in thousands. The persecution and expulsion of ethnic minorities occurred throughout Europe, especially in central and eastern parts of the continent. But events in Poland were particularly important – partly because this was the country where the most comprehensive ethnic cleansing took place, but also because the Polish / Ukrainian problem had such huge consequences for the rest of Europe. It was the nationalist tensions unleashed here that finally brought the Soviets round to the idea of harnessing nationalism for their own ends – not only in Poland but in the whole of the Eastern Bloc. And it was the mutual expulsion of Poles and Ukrainians that would provide the template for ethnic cleansing throughout the continent.

 

However, before one can truly understand events in villages like Zawadka Morochowska, it is necessary to go right back to the beginning. As many historians have pointed out, the ethnic cleansing of Poland did not occur in isolation, but in the aftermath of the greatest war of all time. Poles did not remove Ukrainians simply for the sake of it: it was only the huge events of the war that made such a radical move either desirable or possible.

 

“The borderlands of eastern Poland were invaded not once, but three times during the war: first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and finally by the Soviets again. The different ethnic communities that lived in this richly diverse area reacted to each invasion in different ways.… Both the Soviets and the Nazis played these different ethnic groups off against one another. The Nazis especially sought to harness the nationalist sentiments of the Ukrainians, in order to suppress the rest of the population. Even before the invasion they had made contacts with Ukrainian far-right political groups, particularly the Organisation of Ukrainian Naitonalist (OUN). This was an illegal ultra-nationalist movement, akin to the Ustashas in Croatia or the Iron Guard in Romanian, which embraced the use of violence to achieve its aims. The Nazis dangled the promise of Ukrainian independence before them in return for their collaboration..…”

 

The Origins of Polish / Ukrainian Ethnic Violence

 

The borderlands of eastern Poland were invaded not once, but three times during the war: first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and finally by the Soviets again. The different ethnic communities that lived in this richly diverse area reacted to each invasion in different ways. Most of the Polish population resisted the Nazis and the Soviets alike, in the hope that Poland might somehow be able to return to its prewar status quo. The Ukrainian population, by contrast, was more divided. Almost all of them feared and hated the Russians because of the brutal way that they had ruled the Soviet part of Ukraine during the 1930s; but many welcomed the Germans, at least at first, as liberators. The Jews, meanwhile, did not know where to place their faith. Many hoped that the Soviet invasion might deliver them from Polish and Ukrainian anti-Semitism; later, some seemed to hope that the German invasion would save them from Soviet persecution. By the time the region was invaded for a third time at the end of 1943, the handful of Jews who still survived had lost faith in all outsiders, whatever their nationality.

 

Both the Soviets and the Nazis played these different ethnic groups off against one another. The Nazis especially sought to harness the nationalist sentiments of the Ukrainians, in order to suppress the rest of the population. Even before the invasion they had made contacts with Ukrainian far-right political groups, particularly the Organisation of Ukrainian Naitonalist (OUN). This was an illegal ultra-nationalist movement, akin to the Ustashas in Croatia or the Iron Guard in Romanian, which embraced the use of violence to achieve its aims. The Nazis dangled the promise of Ukrainian independence before them in return for their collaboration. While the most powerful factions of this shady organization never trusted German intentions, other factions enthusiastically allowed themselves to be exploited – partly because they thought the Nazis would give them what they wanted, but also because they shared some of the Nazis darker intentions.

 

The most shameful collaboration between the OUN and the Nazis was the was in which they worked together to eradicate the Jews. The OUN had for years been speaking of ethnic purity, of a “Ukraine for Ukrainians’, and of the benefits of revolutionary terror. The implementation of the Final Solution, particularly in the region of Volhynia, showed followers of the OUN that the slogans were not mere rhetoric. These massacres, which occurred in full view of the general population, would provide the template for all future ethnic cleansing in the region. What once would have been unthinkable now became eminently possible.

[The global-state statesmen depend on this… on this outcome of their constant pressure… toward their never-relinquished ‘vision’… of total-control of the global population (i.e. to realize their fantasy of ‘world order’…) – when applied to their made-conditions: of sculpted-scarcity and manufactured divisions… …so while we may or may not be able to prove these ten thousand create ‘the news’… let’s recall our lesson on the Panopticon… and start the discussion… …of how to withdraw our eyes from them… and to… the world we want… – P.S.]

 

[The global-state statesmen depend on this… on this outcome of their constant pressure… toward their never-relinquished ‘vision’… of total-control of the global population (i.e. to realize their fantasy of ‘world order’…) – when applied to their made-conditions: of sculpted-scarcity and manufactured divisions…

 

…that… once survival-stress has been made to weigh heavily on us… we can be made to accept… whatever they want. ‘Power’ has orchestrated this lesson’s continuous repeat innumerably over the millennia. Recall what we learned from Keith Lowe about it… he quoted a war correspondent who witnessed post-war devastation in Italy: “What we were witnessing in fact was the moral collapse of a people. They had no pride any more, or any dignity. The animal struggle for existence governed everything. Food. That was the only thing that mattered. Food for the children. Food for yourself. Food at the cost of any abasement and depravity. And after food a little warmth and shelter…” on which Lowe commented: “What Moorehead recognized was that food was no longer just a physical issue but a moral one. Across Europe millions of starving people were willing to sacrifice all moral values for the sake of their next meal. Indeed, years of scarcity had changed the very nature of food. What in Britain was regarded as an everyday right had become in the rest of Europe an expression of power…” and… particularly when viewed from the perspective of the global ‘system’… a tool of ‘power’.

 

And as we speak… look around… and tell me you don’t see… this stress that makes us putty in ‘power’s hands being created globally… with the worst suffering dispensed unevenly… the better to ‘pacify’ earth-connected peoples. What do we see?: populations displaced by designer-wars created in closeted-chambers of (the global-) ‘state’… viruses ‘mysteriously’ spread in broadly appearing cases of simultaneous infection… boosted catastrophes in warming seas… coastlines shrinking… food-and-shelter-costs rising… harvests-lost… famines-found… – all around us… the global-state statesmen make the ‘havoc’ they say they’ll ‘save’ us from… a protectionist-racket on a ‘grand’ scale… to install global totalitarianism… in the name of ‘world order’…

 

And while we cannot ‘prove’ that behind-scenes ‘global-state statesmen’…

…who may or may not be official statesmen…

…and who may or may not be captains of industry…

…and who may or may not be the most wealthy in their cohort of ten thousand…

…but who align their wealth – in all its senses – and their allegiance…

…behind their vision of ‘world order’…

…which may or may not be the term we want to use instead of ‘totalitarianism’…

…and…

…as… with the other either may be exchanged…

…it matters not…

…in substance… they are the same…

…so while we may or may not be able to prove these ten thousand create ‘the news’…

…let’s recall our lesson on the Panopticon…

…and start the discussion…

…of how to withdraw our eyes from them…

…and to… the world we want… – P.S.]

* “WUR of October 26th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercials’ I’m planning:

 

“Sisters and Brothers: I think we should talk continuously… perhaps in ‘Meet-Ups’… about the ‘opposite’ of ‘power’…”

 

“So much of our forward movement to freedom rests on language… on knowing exactly what we’re saying… because we’ve discussed the ‘meanings’ of things together… and have come to ‘certainty’ about them… such that we know exactly what we’re saying when we say it… and therefore… mean it…”

 

“Why do we accept the limits imposed by ‘power’? Why do we tell ourselves we’re ‘making a dent in the system’ when we’re not even scratching it? And then… why do we tell ourselves making a dent… added to the dents of others… will eventually end it?… when they’re not aimed at the structural underpinnings?…”

 

“…Returning to the article, ‘Discovering the Water Planet’… ‘each year we kill and discard globally… thirty million metric tons of accidentally-caught marine life….’ Without force in our lives… we would live in harmony… we would ask of the earth only what we needed and give back more… because we give thanks… we have time to…”]

 

Today's show:

 

It could be… we’ve been looking at the question with old eyes… through the old dichotomies… in which we’ve been conditioned to think… and that… thanks to Terence Hopkins… and Immanuel Wallerstein… we now see… there is but one totalitarian regime… and that we are all being ground in its teeth… all being crushed to powder… it takes all of us together… globally… to end ‘power’.… We are living in a moment unique in human history… in which we are all globally… collectively… questioning this… along with all the ideologies that spring from it. ‘Democracy’… untested and presumed… till now… when we need every human being questioning our ‘class’ training… to end ‘power’. I quote Lester Crocker: “The opposite of totalitarianism is not democracy, but the pluralistic society, in which people are free to differ and in which complete conformity is not the test of good citizenship.” We don’t want ‘democracy’ (‘Occupy’ – but one of innumerable instances – is proof… conformity is enforced… and ‘power’ rules…) …we don’t want ‘democracy’… we want to be free… we want… as Karl Popper said… the Open Society.

 

October 22nd, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: As we’ve discussed before on this show… Marcuse wondered whether “the beginning of ‘the reversal’” might need to come from the organized ‘refusal’ of the ‘knowledge-workers’ of ‘the West’… because… it seemed to him… those who live in ‘the global South’ – to use the current phrase – were too-tightly gripped in the teeth of totalitarianism. Now… from the vantage gained in the years subsequent – now that we’ve seen… and are seeing… Egypt… Ukraine… Scotland… Hong Kong… and upcoming Catalonia – do we agree?

 

It could be… we’ve been looking at the question with old eyes… through the old dichotomies… in which we’ve been conditioned to think… and that… thanks to Terence Hopkins… and Immanuel Wallerstein… we now see… there is but one totalitarian regime… and that we are all being ground in its teeth… all being crushed to powder… it takes all of us together… globally… to end ‘power’.

 

In the November 11, 2012 show excerpt I posted (below) on the role of ‘government’… we said ‘the state’ exists to keep a tight lid on ‘its’ citizens. But we are living in a moment unique in human history… in which we are all globally… collectively… questioning this… and with that pondering… another: we are considering that the problem we face is bigger than the bloated heads and puffed-up chests of those ‘power’-mad-ten-thousand… that its source lies in the mindset of ‘class’… a totalitarian mindset that brooks no challenges… a mindset… the sheer scope of which requires all hands on deck… and for our thought to swell to encompass it… a mindset that we are stripping bear and submitting to our scrutiny… along with all the ideologies that spring from it. ‘Democracy’… untested and presumed… till now… when we need every human being questioning our ‘class’ training… to end ‘power’.

 

In a recent article by Heng He (in the Epoch Times of October 9 – 15, 2014) about the courage of Hong Kong… challenging the ‘bully-state’… she states that “democracy is the opposite of dictatorship…” but we’ve been schooled better for some time now. In “Unpacking Democracy”, I quote Lester Crocker: “The opposite of totalitarianism is not democracy, but the pluralistic society, in which people are free to differ and in which complete conformity is not the test of good citizenship.”

 

We don’t want ‘democracy’ (‘Occupy’ – but one of innumerable instances – is proof… conformity is enforced… and ‘power’ rules…)

 

…we don’t want ‘democracy’… we want to be free… we want… as Karl Popper said… the Open Society.

 

Please listen to (and read) the following from the Waking Up Radio show of November 11th, 2012… on “Questioning the Role of the Individual Nation-State in the International ‘Power’ System… Towards Getting Clear On What We Want” [more forthcoming]:

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“What the professional Left never legitimates with its discourse is the question, “What is the vision on which ‘power’ has its wealth concentrated? Where are they going, these guys?…”

 

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What the professional Left never legitimates with its discourse is the question, “What is the vision on which ‘power’ has its wealth concentrated? Where are they going, these guys?

 

The professional Left is always on the defensive. It never asks itself, “If the Right is on the offensive… – for example, this consistent focus on ‘voter-suppression’ across the decades – the Left never says, “If the Right is on the offensive, what is it on the offensive toward?” What is its goal? Is it really just the ‘freedom’ to rape and pillage the earth unhindered?… to amass money with no restrictions? A moment’s thought, I think, will show that if ‘stuff’ if finite… and ‘power’s eaten the whole… it must have a larger goal… which… to achieve… might not ‘the state’… as we think of it… be but means?

 

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“So is ‘the role of government’ to get the ‘best deal’ for ‘its’ citizens in the global competition?… or… is it to get the best performance out of ‘its’ citizens… so the state can perform well in the global competition… which is more the right-wing perspective. What seems unchallenged, though, is ‘the global competition’: the state ‘must’ ‘win’. But why?… and… ‘win’ what?…”

 

–––

 

Let’s turn now to this question, “What is the role of ‘the state’: we’re going to get some early thoughts on it… and some contemporary thoughts on it. Jeremy Bentham, an English ‘philosopher’ who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – someone who wrote on ‘ethics’… on matters of morals and law – believed that “the task of government is to increase want, to make the physical sanction of hunger effective…” – effectively to squeeze the most (get the best performance?…) out of ‘its’ people. And Townsend asked, “what would become of the Fatherland, unless we could rely on the poor, to do the servile, sordid and ignoble work, and die on the battlefield.” These guys were writing at a time when they didn’t have to worry about you and me – the commoners – listening in… so they could speak frankly. They knew they were writing either for the ‘philosopher-kings’… or the ‘rulers’… or the ‘shepherds’… or the ‘sheepdogs’… but they weren’t writing for us… and didn’t have to worry about what we thought of this.

 

Townsend also said, “When the poor are obliged to cultivate the friendship of the rich, the rich will never want inclination to relieve the distress of the poor.”

 

You know, I say these are ‘early thoughts’… but you hear them still… out there: this longing for that paternalistic age when people stopped wanting to take charge of things for themselves… and just ‘stayed in their place…”

 

But I’m hearing a more ‘benevolent’ role described today… from the Left (not the Right.)

 

I heard, for instance, Robert Reich say recently (November 2, 2012) that, “the role of government is to make life better for its citizens.” Is that true? Is that propaganda? How would we categorize it… that phrase… since we’re in a categorizing ‘non-culture of invisibility.”

 

And three weeks earlier (October 16, 2012) I heard a right-wing pundit say that, “the role of government is to energize the American economy so you can be a force for good in the world… a reluctant sheriff…” Now, this is obvious… – I was about to say that this is obvious propaganda… but it’s a telling statement… because… on the one hand… it feels almost more honest than Reich’s statement… and at the same time it’s obviously also propaganda.

 

So how do we decide ‘what is the role of government’? Is it to get the best ‘deal’ for ‘its’ citizens in the global competition?… which I think might be implied by Reich’s words. Certainly the ‘citizenry’ was missing from the consideration of the right-wing pundit. For him, the sole point was “to be a force for ‘good’ in the world…” – and that… of course… since we-the-commoners are not included in the decision-making… what is deemed ‘good’ will be determined by the ‘rulers’… and I fear that word ‘good’ because it was a word that Plato relied a lot on to justify the crimes of the state of his day.

 

So is ‘the role of government’ to get the ‘best deal’ for ‘its’ citizens in the global competition?… or… is it to get the best performance out of ‘its’ citizens… so the state can perform well in the global competition… which is more the right-wing perspective. What seems unchallenged, though, is ‘the global competition’: the state ‘must’ ‘win’. But why?… and… ‘win’ what? ‘Accolades from “its” people’? – ha ha ha – obviously… no. It couldn’t give two pieces of excrement for what we think. Well then, strokes from who?… the Big Dogs? And pundits – left, right, and center – are absorbed with this project. Left, right and center… they fear ‘the people’… have in their minds that the energy of the people – unleashed – is ‘chaos’. And I think they dream Plato’s dream of ‘order’… fixed in place.

 

So this ‘play-within-a-play’ I’ve been talking about… could be called ‘Perfecting Economy’ – defined as ‘free market’ and ‘state’ – so they work together… like clockwork… effortlessly… in an almost ‘self-stabilizing’ manner.

 

But that ‘state’ and that ‘economy’ are not the ones ‘the people’ speak of… rather… that ‘state’ and that ‘economy’… are works still in progress… are yet to be crafted… as that ‘state’ and that ‘economy’… are one and the same… will be… is their fond hope… in that unfolded day… fixed-in-place… Plato’s dictum… “no change”.

 

So if in fact the role of the individual ‘nation-state’ in an international ‘state-system’ is to get the ‘best performance’ out of ‘its’ people… – is that something we agree with? I think we are in a moment where we are finally scrutinizing the implicit assumptions of ‘governance’… of ‘rule’ over us… of the entire game: ‘the class system’.

 

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…there is a darker side to ‘journalism’… because in truth media serves as ‘power’s ‘propaganda conduit’ – a tool for supporting ‘power’s purposes (…and by the way… on this tip… given the singular nature of the threat… posed by the Occupy Movement… to the U.S. state… why was there nothing about it in the Snowden revelations? What did he say when they asked him about it?… Or maybe their powers of analysis didn’t swim that deep? Could it be… the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree?… and that the true man only appears… before the notoriety?… that the truth of him is in how he acted before he stood in the light of scrutiny? And could it be… ‘they’ plan… to re-take that key piece in the chess game called ‘World Supremacy’: the U.S. presidency?

 

Plato’s propaganda playbook… we’ve argued… can be reduced to four words: “keep ‘the [human] cattle herded.” Of the many essential discussions – precursors to our beginning to organize for and plan a fundamentally different future… one without ‘rank’ – the question of how ‘rulers’ go about accomplishing this goal remains a glaring absence… we said last week. But equally absent… and needed… is the discussion of why it is a sine qua non… for ‘power’.

 

It was after listening to former Washington Post head honcho Ben Bradley say that it’s an exciting thing to begin to see the (actual) truth beneath the official ‘truth’… that I began to think more about this ‘why’… to consider again the official message as to ‘why’ – I thought again about what lies buried… beneath.

 

The ‘power’-guys… the global-state-statesmen have analyzed quite carefully what threatens their fundamental interests… and what doesn’t.…

(…and by the way… on this tip… given the singular nature of the threat… posed by the Occupy Movement… to the U.S. state… why was there nothing about it in the Snowden revelations? What did he say when they asked him about it?… Or maybe their powers of analysis didn’t swim that deep? Could it be… the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree?… and that the true man only appears… before the notoriety?… that the truth of him is in how he acted before he stood in the light of scrutiny? And could it be… ‘they’ plan… to re-take that key piece in the chess game called ‘World Supremacy’: the U.S. presidency?

 

Last week [October 19, 2014] we took issue with ‘journalism’ for congratulating itself on exposing ‘power’s crimes [when ‘power’ happily supplies an endless line of them to occupy… ‘journalism’…] while… if it rejected ‘power’s premises… and supported popular self-organization – propagated the thoughts that help us see beyond ‘class’ – it would support our evolving together… as global humans.

 

But stating the concern like this was being over-generous… as there is a darker side to ‘journalism’… because in truth media serves as ‘power’s ‘propaganda conduit’ – a tool for supporting ‘power’s purposes.

 

Now… while I say honesty is our ‘ace in the hole’… they can pay anyone to do anything… and the media… dutifully… megaphones. This is a big piece of our ‘strategy discussion’… a big problem with which to come to grips… and have our counter-strategy for. They own the media. They own the messages that get out there… and they have no scruples and endless resources.

 

Meanwhile… the damage has been done… because the whole game is about popular opinion… which… once lost… could take generations to rebuild… I listened recently to some commentators on the Left talk… with a strong sense of urgency… about the need for “everybody to go vote… and we’re gonna have to organize and get busy…” and I’m thinking… now the whole time they were constructing the message that “Barack’s is a ‘failed presidency’…” in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. I mean who other could have… with the resistance he faced… pushed through health care for everyone?… – and of course it’s not the universal health care we want… but it’s an amazing accomplishment… improvement… to say the least. And look what Eric Holder has done in the arena of trying to protect the vote… the very vote folks are saying is in jeopardy. The U.S. is a state that is run behind scenes… as most states are… and as long as we are not able to talk about the fact that the ‘power’-guys stay hidden… behind scenes… and have an agenda… and are pushing us towards ‘global order’… When are we going to start talking about the fact that we have to begin planning for our vision… that ‘democracy’ is not, in fact, ‘open’. ‘Democracy’ means “‘power’ constructs popular opinion…” as we’ve been seeing… with their control of the media. ‘Democracy’ means they control the message… they control popular opinion… and they get the result they want. ‘Democracy’ means how… whatever it takes [in terms of popular support… – numbers…] for them to get that result… they get it… so they can claim there is a ‘democracy’. And our ‘representation’… we-the-people’s… simply go along with that lie… there’s no challenge to that lie… in the progressive… so-called… media. So how are we gonna break through that façade? How are we gonna get to the truth: that we need a different world? And that we have to work together… we-the-people – it’s not gonna be something that we can accomplish using the existing mechanisms… the existing mechanisms were designed to do exactly what they do… which is to maintain ‘rule by the few.’

 

Meanwhile… the damage has been done… because the whole game is about popular opinion… which… once lost… could take generations to rebuild [to regain certainty about the need to challenge ‘power’…] as we’re seeing… in our reading of Savage Continent… what was done in just four decades… to destroy carefully-knit solidarity. We can't afford at this juncture to let ‘power’s scams go unchallenged. We have to begin that conversation.

 

I listened recently to some commentators on the Left talk… with a strong sense of urgency… about the need for “everybody to go vote because “they’re predicting the Republicans are gonna take the Senate… and we’re gonna have to organize and get busy…” and I’m thinking… now the whole time they were constructing the message that “Barack’s is a ‘failed presidency’…” in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. I mean who other could have… with the resistance he faced… pushed through health care for everyone?… – and of course it’s not the universal health care we want… but it’s an amazing accomplishment… improvement… to say the least. And look what Eric Holder has done in the arena of trying to protect the vote… the very vote folks are saying is in jeopardy. The U.S. is a state that is run behind scenes… as most states are… and as long as we are not able to talk about the fact that the ‘power’-guys stay hidden… behind scenes… and have an agenda… and are pushing us towards ‘global order’… their concept of ‘order’… and that there is no way… state by state… to address that./p>

 

And we cannot address… the night before an election… the damage that they systematically have been constructing over years. When are we going to start talking about the fact that we have to begin planning for our vision… that ‘democracy’ is not, in fact, ‘open’. ‘Democracy’ means “‘power’ constructs popular opinion…” as we’ve been seeing… with their control of the media. ‘Democracy’ means they control the message… they control popular opinion… and they get the result they want. ‘Democracy’ means how… whatever it takes [in terms of popular support… – numbers…] for them to get that result… they get it… so they can claim there is a ‘democracy’. And our ‘representation’… we-the-people’s… simply go along with that lie… there’s no challenge to that lie… in the progressive… so-called… media. So how are we gonna break through that façade? How are we gonna get to the truth: that we need a different world? And that we have to work together… we-the-people – it’s not gonna be something that we can accomplish using the existing mechanisms… the existing mechanisms were designed to do exactly what they do… which is to maintain ‘rule by the few.’

 

Recall Hitler’s ‘the secret pleasure of fascists [read: totalitarians…]’: “It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them…” – quoted by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good. ‘Power’ is very theatrical. The recent ‘interview’ conducted with Henry Kissinger about his book World Order on the radio program The Takeaway – pure theater …

 

Recall Hitler’s ‘the secret pleasure of fascists [read: totalitarians…]’: “It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them…” – quoted by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good.

 

‘Power’ is very theatrical. The recent ‘interview’ conducted with Henry Kissinger about his book World Order on the radio program The Takeaway – pure theater [“See… you had the chance to interrogate a key man – in the manufacture of ‘power’s self-justification… with which to con future generations – as to his thought’s underlying premises… and you blew it with your arrogance!”])

[Apologies… we didn’t get to all of the planned show… the missing end will be in our show on November 2nd… – P.S.]

 

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[Continuing with our reading of Chapter 18 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”… – P.S.]

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“The taboos had already been broken: young Ukrainian men here had become both trained to kill, and inured to mass killing.……” – [We have both a critical opportunity with the massive youth population around the world… and an enormous threat. Because there is… as we’re gonna discuss… an effort to turn these young people in a fascist direction. It is imperative that we begin taking the responsibility for seizing the initiative with these young people… – P.S.]

 

During the course of 1941 and 1942, about 12,000 Ukrainian policemen became intimately acquainted with the tactics the Nazis used to kill over 200,000 Volhynian Jews. As collaborators, they were involved in the planning of operations. They gave assurances to local populations in order to lull them into a false sense of security. They were employed in the sudden encirclement of Jewish villages and settlements, and even took part in some of the killing itself. The slaughter of the Jews was the perfect apprenticeship for what would come later.

 

At the end of 1942, when it first became obvious that German power was waning, these same Ukrainian policemen deserted their posts en masse. They took their weapons and went to join the OUN’s new, armed partisan group, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, or UPA). They used the skills they had learned under the Nazis to continue their campaign against their ethnic enemies – not only the region’s few remaining Jews, but this time also its large Polish population.

 

The massacre of Poles began in the same areas where Ukrainian policemen had been most intimately connected to the massacre of Jews: Volhynia. There were many reasons why the ethnic cleansing began here – the area contained extensive forests and marshes, and so was particularly suited to partisan activity, and the isolated Polish communities were much less well defended than in other areas – but the previous actions against the Jews certainly played their part. The taboos had already been broken: young Ukrainian men here had become both trained to kill, and inured to mass killing.…

[We have both a critical opportunity with the massive youth population around the world… and an enormous threat. Because there is… as we’re gonna discuss… an effort to turn these young people in a fascist direction. It is imperative that we begin taking the responsibility for seizing the initiative with these young people… – P.S.]

…When they embarked on their cleansing of the region at the end of 1942 they were therefore relatively free of both external and personal constraints.

 

In the frenzied massacres that were to take place over the next few years, Polish communities were murdered in their entirety, from old men and women right down to newborn babies. The village of Oleksieta, for example, was torched during the Easter of 1943 in an operation deliberately designed to create terror amongst the Polish population. In Wysocko Wyzne thirteen children were locked in a Catholic church which was then set on fire. In Wola Ostrowiecka the entire Polish community was rounded up in the local schoolyard. While the men were taken off five at a time to be hacked to death in a nearby barn, the women and children were driven into the school, which was blown up with hand grenades and then set on fire.

 

“Even UPA reports themselves confirm that they set out to exterminate Poles as thoroughly as the Jews had already been exterminated, and in many areas succeeded. One of UPA’s commanders-in-chief, Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi, advised his commanders to ‘liquidate the entire male [Polish] population between 16 and 60 years’, and ordered that ‘villages in the forests and villages adjacent to forests should be razed to the ground’. The local commander of the Zavykhost region, Iurii Stel’mashchuk, admitted that he had been given an order for ‘the total physical extermination of the Polish population in all western provinces of Ukraine…” – [Do we really have to… ourselves… literally be in the hands of the bought functionaries of global-state-totalitarians… before we’re willing to see and start discussing the import of the consistent repetition of supposedly ‘senseless violence’… the results of which are never discussed as part of a coherent world-plan… the same world-plan we’re being shown in Savage Continent? – P.S.]

 

In the village of Podkamien a campaign of night-time raids on remote farmsteads and outlying hamlets drove the villagers out of their homes. At first they took to sleeping in the fields in order to avoid surprise attacks, but eventually they sought sanctuary in the local monastery. On 12 March 1944, however, the monastery itself was besieged by UPA troops. Apart from a few people who managed to escape by jumping out of windows, the entire community – including the monks – was slaughtered. Their bodies were hung by the legs around the monastery as a warning to the rest of the Polish community of what lay in store for them if they stayed in the region….

[How much longer… will we subject… our inherent longing… for good fellowship… to the ‘rulers’ need… for an illusory ‘supremacy? Of Thomas Hobbes, Kissinger writes that he provided the so-called ‘masters’ with their needed sense of legitimacy – in the face of their obvious depravity: “The sovereign state’s monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome the perpetual fear of violent death and war…” – P.S.]

…These are just a handful of examples that must stand for the hundreds of Polish villages affected by ethnic violence in 1943 and 1944. According to not only Polish sources but German and Soviet ones, Ukrainian partisans indulged in beheading, crucifying, dismembering and disembowelling their victims, and often displayed bodies in a conscious attempt to strike terror into the remaining Polish community. They burned homes and churches, razed villages and looted whatever they could lay their hands on. This took place throughout eastern Poland / western Ukraine. Any Ukrainians who attempted to shelter their Polish neighbors were also killed.

 

Even UPA reports themselves confirm that they set out to exterminate Poles as thoroughly as the Jews had already been exterminated, and in many areas succeeded. One of UPA’s commanders-in-chief, Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi, advised his commanders to ‘liquidate the entire male [Polish] population between 16 and 60 years’, and ordered that ‘villages in the forests and villages adjacent to forests should be razed to the ground’. The local commander of the Zavykhost region, Iurii Stel’mashchuk, admitted that he had been given an order for ‘the total physical extermination of the Polish population in all western provinces of Ukraine. Fulfilling this order of the OUN leaders, a formation consisting of several UPA bands slaughtered more than 15,000 Poles in August 1943.

 

In reaction to such events, some local Poles began to set up their own militias for the purpose of self-defence. The Polish underground also diverted resources away from resisting the occupation in order to protect Polish communities from the UPA….

[Do we really have to… ourselves… literally be in the hands of the bought functionaries of global-state-totalitarians… before we’re willing to see and start discussing the import of the consistent repetition of supposedly ‘senseless violence’… the results of which never get tied to the precipitating events… or discussed as part of a coherent world-plan… the same world-plan we’re being shown in Savage Continent? Numerous contemporary horrors come to mind: Syrians and Iraqis forced to try to distinguish purposely clouded motives behind the acts of numerous shady actors… and… in a tribute to the journalist Charles Bowden that I just heard (it’s October 23, 2014 as I write these words…) a rebroadcast of an interview with him from 2010 on the radio program Uprisings… about his book Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields… the confusing… and unexplained… fact revealed in the interview that the U.S. state is paying the Mexican state to slaughter its own people – these are not senseless acts… most of us down-here-on-the-ground know that… but our representatives over the airwaves are not organizing the necessary discussions… – P.S.]

“…these numbers are controversial, and subject to an ongoing argument between Polish and Ukrainian historians over who owns the rights to victimhood. In one sense, the absolute numbers do not really matter – it is enough to register that a violent civil war took place and that thousands died on both sides. But in another sense the numbers are desperately important, especially in a climate where nationalism is on the rise once more across Europe…” – [I can’t help but think of the words of the khokhol… in Maxim Gorky’s Mother… just four decades previous… particularly as… as Keith Lowe says… a fascistic ‘nationalism’ is being fed… financed – for… never forget who sits on the aggregate resources of the planet… who has the funds… to make much ‘mischief’? – The khokhol said, “A new heart’s being born nenko. A new heart’s being born to life. Man is striding ahead, pouring the light of Reason on the world and calling as he goes: ‘People of all lands, unite in one family!’ And in answer to his call all sound hearts join to form one huge heart, as strong and sonorous as a silver bell.” What we are seeing in this story of massive grief Lowe is re-telling… is a misery brewed by the few… to consume precisely this dream of the many – a dream that is patently our future. – P.S.]

 

…Some Volhynian Poles turned to the Germans for jobs as policemen so that they might have opportunities for revenge. (The Germans certainly appeared happy to recruit them, and a new wave of collaboration was born – ironically in the name of controlling former collaborators who were now running amok.) When the Soviets arrived in 1944, many Poles joined the Red Army or the NKVD – again, with the purpose of exacting revenge for all they had suffered. Ukrainian villages were burned, and thousands of Ukrainian peasants killed, in both official and unofficial reprisals for the actions of UPA.

[The earth rears powerful children… of this the inauthentic ‘power’ has long known… to eradicate its competition… a war on the earth-connected… has long been ‘power’s M.O. (see above on the current such assault going on in Mexico – see the Uygurs… the Tibetans… the Bedouins.) These are not ‘senseless acts’… ‘power’ wants no competitors when it comes to claiming the minds… and ears… and hearts… of ‘its’ citizens… – P.S.]

These reprisals, naturally were used by Ukrainian partisans as further justification for their targeting of Poles and Polish villages. And so the situation degenerated into a vicious cycle….

 

…During the final year of the war, and in its immediate aftermath, the entire region was engulfed in what was effectively a civil war. What began in Volhynia spread to Galicia and central Poland. Poles and Ukrainians slaughtered one another and burned each other’s villages with an enthusiasm that far exceeded any of their actions against the German or Soviet occupiers. Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish partisan at the time, put this conflict in stark terms:

They had killed seven men two nights previously; that night we killed sixteen of theirs… A week later the Ukrainians responded by wiping out an entire Polish colony, setting fire to the houses, killing those inhabitants unable to flee and raping the women who fell into their hands… We retaliated by attacking an even bigger Ukrainian village and this time two or three men in our unit killed women and children… The Ukrainians in turn took their revenge by destroying a village of 500 Poles and torturing and killing all who fell into their hands. We responded by destroying two of their larger villages… This was how the fighting escalated. Each time more people were killed, more houses burnt, more women raped. Men become desensitized very quickly and kill as if they know nothing else.

It is in this context that we must see the massacre at Zawadka Morochowska that I described at the beginning of this chapter. When viewed in isolation, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that it was a cold-blooded, purely Polish crime, committed in the name of ethnic cleansing. When one widens the time-frame slightly, and discovers that the units involved in the massacre had suffered casualties during an attack by UPA partisans only the day before, it no longer seems quite so cold-blooded. And when one widens the time-frame still further, and discovers that some of those involved in the massacre were veterans of the civil war between Poles and Ukrainians in Volhynia, revenge begins to look like a much stronger motive. The context in no way justifies what occurred at Zawadka Morochowska, or indeed the attacks on any of the other Ukrainian villages in south-east Poland in 1946 – but it does go part of the way towards explaining it.

 

Even the most conservative estimates suggest that around 50,000 Polish civilians were killed by Ukrainian partisans in Volhynia, and a further 20,000 to 30,000 in Galicia. In total it is thought that up to 90,000 Poles were killed throughout the borderland areas during the civil conflict. Ukrainian deaths also number in the thousands, but since the Poles did not enter the conflict with an explicit plan to commit genocide, the Ukrainian faction lost far fewer people than they killed – perhaps 20,000 in all. As with so many other areas of wartime European history, these numbers are controversial, and subject to an ongoing argument between Polish and Ukrainian historians over who owns the rights to victimhood. In one sense, the absolute numbers do not really matter – it is enough to register that a violent civil war took place and that thousands died on both sides. But in another sense the numbers are desperately important, especially in a climate where nationalism is on the rise once more across Europe. Ukrainians, naturally, are reluctant to admit to the role of the OUN and UPA in starting the cycle of violence, and in their attempts to minimize the numbers of Polish dead occasionally distort the figures. Some Poles, on the other hand, wield statistics like a weapon in a historiographic rerun of the civil war itself. In such a highly charged atmosphere, it is unlikely that any agreement over figures will be reached – the ones I have given above are the most impartial estimates available.

[I can’t help but think of the words of the khokhol… in Maxim Gorky’s Mother… just four decades previous… particularly as… as Keith Lowe says… a fascistic ‘nationalism’ is being fed… financed – for… never forget who sits on the aggregate resources of the planet… who has the funds… to make much ‘mischief’…

 

The khokhol said, “A new heart’s being born nenko. A new heart’s being born to life. Man is striding ahead, pouring the light of Reason on the world and calling as he goes: ‘People of all lands, unite in one family!’ And in answer to his call all sound hearts join to form one huge heart, as strong and sonorous as a silver bell.”

 

What we are seeing in this story of massive grief Lowe is re-telling… is a misery brewed by the few… to consume precisely this dream of the many – a dream that is patently our future. It is a flame we will not let die… but rather… a fire… our one sun… that is the collective weight… of the ancestors… telling us… that our time for unity… for being one family… has come – regeneration…. Remember that “longest stride of soul men ever took…”? “Affairs are now… soul size…” Indeed. – P.S.]

* “WUR of November 2nd, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

…in re-reading the words of the first ‘non-coercion commercial’ I posted with this show – while simultaneously asking myself, “what would impel… here in the U.S.… challenges to ‘power’ in this moment?” (and I mean to the heart of ‘the system’…) – I think I found answers to both. Its words, I think – in addition to: “Unmasking Democracy”… provide that thread. And for the second question… what needs to be said to youth (and all good folks…) concerned about ocean-death – about the burden that dis-ease and ill-health imposes on our earth: if you aren’t able yet to see the inherent unfairness of forcing work out of us… then… know this: we heal the planet by getting the weight of our sorrow… off of it…

 

Sisters and Brothers: It’s been difficult to focus of late… for reasons I’ve already stated… hard to sit with the words unbeleaguered… and try to see the unifying theme that’s usually there in my thoughts for the show. You see… I tend to write what I’m given – and I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious (particularly as there are frequent revisions…) – and then only after see the thread that ties them together. This ‘seeing’ has been especially difficult this week. But in re-reading the words of the first ‘non-coercion commercial’ I posted with this show – while simultaneously asking myself, “what would impel… here in the U.S…. challenges to ‘power’ in this moment?” (and I mean to the heart of ‘the system’…) – I think I found answers to both. Its words, I think – in addition to: “Unmasking Democracy”… provide that thread. And for the second question… what needs to be said to youth (and all good folks…) concerned about ocean-death – about the burden that dis-ease and ill-health imposes on our earth: if you aren’t able yet to see the inherent unfairness of forcing work out of us… then… know this: we heal the planet by getting the weight of our sorrow… off of it. So I’ll repeat those words that I think serve to link our thoughts today:

 

[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercials’ I’m planning:

 

“Why aren’t we saying the goal for all of us to unite behind? What bothers me… is not… at base… money… it’s their control of our lives that bothers me. Money simply tokens this control… measures its degree… but keeping you and me from developing our full human possibilities… when there’s absolutely no need… no reason… beyond lust for supremacy… To do this signals a narcissistic depravity that would bring down all life in its wake… cares not a whit for planetary health… hears no counsel beyond the walls of its poor self… cannot its own… dis-owned self… hear… What is our goal?… if not to release our lives… all life… from this… death grip. I think we have to be concerned at this juncture… when all life is at risk… with the narrowing of goal implied by ‘nationalisms’… of whatever kind…”

 

…but today I would add: “and choose instead open tribes: generous… cooperative… earth-connected and protective.

 

“…he put his thought-process on hold. What we haven't sufficiently credited is that… that’s what ‘work’ does… not just what ‘work in the military’ does… that’s what ‘work overall’ does… it puts our thought-process on hold… and when we accept others telling us what our work is… we’re shown the most relevant meaning of George Eliot’s words: ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds…”]

 

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It is a Fearless Youth Energy – willing… to face… to see… what an undue sense of guilt at their forced complicity turned their elders’ eyes from – a Fearless Youth Energy that we’re seeing today: manifesting the ancestors’ call… to correct millennia-long wrongs. They see… what’s happening… and heroes that they are… are stepping up to take that “longest stride of soul”… to a future that’s free… What’s needed is for us to globally plan… plan for building the certainty within the hearts of our brothers and sisters… that we don’t need the statesmen’s ‘management’ of us… which… to say the least… it is incredibly energy-inefficient (as Nikola Tesla told us… a hundred years ago…): to throw away the power and creative energy of the vast… vast… majority… energy that we want to share… cooperatively… guided by our self-created… freely-developing… individualities as they grow… given joyfully… without force – energy that cannot exist under terms of coercion… under compulsion – “…every effort under compulsion requires a sacrifice of life energy…”)…

 

October 27th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: “There’s fascists a’foot. There be fascists in the woods…” – the world reeks of Hidden Schemes and False Actors… infiltrating… trying to unseat what cannot be unseated: our understanding of the motive forces Behind Things… particularly: the sad need to feel ‘supreme’ that led abandoned children – the would-be ‘global-statesmen’ – to unleash disharmony and misery upon the world. It is a Fearless Youth Energy – willing… to face… to see… what an undue sense of guilt at their forced complicity turned their elders’ eyes from – a Fearless Youth Energy that we’re seeing today: manifesting the ancestors’ call… to correct millennia-long wrongs. They see… what’s happening… and heroes that they are… are stepping up to take that “longest stride of soul”… to a future that’s free. Shout-outs and thanks for all the uncommon courage we’re seeing around us today: Burkina Faso is striding forth… as Maxim Gorky saw… not long ago… that we globally would do… and Hong Kong!… is facing the massive threat of a deeply-entrenched set of illusory beliefs in the ‘legitimacy’ (due to some fanciful sense of ‘supremacy’) of ‘rule’. I long to see the rest of us… we hunched down in our safer seats in the Theater of the Mad… match your courage… step-by-step. What’s needed is for us to globally plan… plan for building the certainty within the hearts of our brothers and sisters… that we don’t need the statesmen’s ‘management’ of us… which… to say the least… it is incredibly energy-inefficient (as Nikola Tesla told us… a hundred years ago…): to throw away the power and creative energy of the vast… vast… majority… energy that we want to share… cooperatively… guided by our self-created… freely-developing… individualities as they grow… given joyfully… without force – energy that cannot exist under terms of coercion… under compulsion – “…every effort under compulsion requires a sacrifice of life energy…”)

 

Given the uniformity with which we long for freedom… ‘power’ can only defeat this by sowing the seeds of Division and Dissension among us… can only stay ahead of… and on top of… we-the-people… by seeming to be a necessary arbiter of conflicting agencies… using the ideology of ‘democracy’ to create the needed ‘legitimacy’ for its efforts – as it has cornered the techniques… for gaining the support of the ‘majority.’

 

But we are honing in on… the key one… we are honing in on ‘democracy’ – as ideology.

 

And no less explosive was the effect of Barack’s election on the world population – All over the world the universe had changed… grown more expansive. Anything was now possible. Directly from this world-shifting event – and… never forget… we’re talking about the U.S. state… the birthplace of fascism in the shape of “‘New World’ ‘slavery’ becomes Jim Crow South” – directly from this paradigm-shift followed… arguably… but I believe… because of the convergence of the approach of ‘Near-Total-Earth-Resource-Consumption-Point’ – and its attendant ‘economic’ and ‘environmental’ crises – occurring simultaneously with unprecedented percentages of youth in the world: Tunisia… Egypt… Occupy… Wisconsin… Expanding Anti-Privatization around the globe – i.e. the Global Awakening – “…every effort under compulsion requires a sacrifice of life energy…”) …So ‘power’ is now mobilized to a degree not seen since WWII. They will settle for nothing but total global submission to their Authority. In the face of which… where are we?

 

In Waking Up… [and you can read this reference on the (online) page from its final chapter called “The Plan – Section 1”…] I said that:

And we must also have no illusions about what a President can do. I am immensely and forever grateful to Barack Obama for…it would be interesting to pause our discussion and finish this sentence – to examine the question of what it is he has precisely done. I find it irritating in the extreme the trivialization I hear from the left of what that is. But pursuing that fish would be a distraction from the present point: no President of the United States can bring us our future. His job will not allow it (not in the job description, folks, it really ain’t). He can save a few lives (and if it’s your life saved, that’s a huge deal), reduce the suffering, ameliorate the distress, he can buy time – but the future is up to us.

…and this is true. But a gift like Barack… do you truly… you on the Left… do you truly not see what having him has meant?… and I don’t just mean all that he’s accomplished… in the face of a solid block of resistance – all that he’s done to widen our agency… as ‘citizens’ – our ability to begin to confront the massive totalitarian threat which is this moment – but what he… the man… has meant for our agency as world-‘citizens’…

(…can we see this particularly now that we’ve been schooled by Bentham on ‘power’s unequivocal determination to control – via its policing of education and the media – the thoughts available for us to think… and by Popper and Alice Miller on the deep roots… in the histories of ‘class’-humans generally… and in each one of us specifically… the deep roots of the totalitarian mind-set… and that… therefore… the effect on ‘power’ was as explosive as it was unexpected…. His election was not just a ‘wake-up’ call… did not just school them on the massive shift in the populace that had germinated and bloomed under their very noses… but forced a total re-ordering of their thinking and priorities. Urgently they turned afresh… to the project ‘control of the populace’….

 

And no less explosive was the effect of Barack’s election on the world population – “Pourquoi pas nous?” – went up on café walls in Paris. All over the world the universe had changed… grown more expansive. Anything was now possible. Directly from this world-shifting event – and… never forget… we’re talking about the U.S. state… the birthplace of fascism in the shape of “‘New World’ ‘slavery’ becomes Jim Crow South” – directly from this paradigm-shift followed… arguably… but I believe… because of the convergence of the approach of ‘Near-Total-Earth-Resource-Consumption-Point’ – and its attendant ‘economic’ and ‘environmental’ crises – occurring simultaneously with unprecedented percentages of youth in the world… Tunisia… Egypt… Occupy… Wisconsin… Expanding Anti-Privatization around the globe – i.e. the Global Awakening.

 

So ‘power’ is now mobilized to a degree not seen since WWII. They will settle for nothing but total global submission to their Authority. In the face of which… where are we?)

The role of ‘head of state’ serves as a lighting rod… a punching-bag… a booster… a buffer… and a deflector – it is a part played in the Theater of the Mad… and all who sit in its seats… until we-the-people construct the exits… are trapped.… When they put that man with a gun in that elevator with Barack at the CDC… they were letting him know… “we can take you out at any time….” The only thing that holds them back is their suspicion… that in this moment of such widespread awakening… such a move could blow-back big-time on them.

 

So in this light can we see… what the election of Barack has meant for the widening of our agency as humans trapped in the ‘class system’?

 

…despite the fact… that… the office of the U.S. President… while not ceremonial… is certainly constricted… exists within a tight coil of pressure called the ‘global order’… the ‘world-system’… that is ever-striving toward an illusory ‘Supremacy’.

 

The role of ‘head of state’ serves as a lighting rod… a punching-bag… a booster… a buffer… and a deflector – it is a part played in the Theater of the Mad… and all who sit in its seats… until we-the-people construct the exits… are trapped.

 

So Barack is… in the limited sense just described… “at the helm” of a mechanism that eats ‘health’ and spits out Death – and this is the machine that all of us who do not want to see its priorities established for the globe… are wrestling with.

 

When they put that man with a gun in that elevator with Barack at the CDC… they were letting him know… “we can take you out at any time….” The only thing that holds them back is their suspicion… that in this moment of such widespread awakening… such a move could blow-back big-time on them.

 

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We’ve been discussing how ‘democracy’ serves to legitimate ‘power’… as… what lies hidden – because never discussed – is ‘power’s construction of popular opinion… Do any among us deny this? Where’s the discussion of this… in our so-called ‘democracy’?

 

We’ve been discussing how ‘democracy’ serves to legitimate ‘power’… as… what lies hidden – because never discussed – is ‘power’s construction of popular opinion… Do any among us deny this? Where’s the discussion of this… in our so-called ‘democracy’?

(…for all who require it… this site is ‘proof’… as it is replete with critical… though silenced… voices and discussions… that we-the-people need to expand our human possibilities… to grow as human beings… and in particular… for us to grow big enough to confront the massive global human suppression by ‘power’. To name but a few:

 

…we’ve been listening to Bentham on the premises of ‘governance’ (under ‘class’…) – the importance of ‘internalized discipline’…

…and Alice Miller on ‘obedience’ and the roots of violence in ‘Western’ child-rearing practices…

 

We are trying to show the necessary relationship (under ‘class’… given ‘power’…) between ‘democracy’ (and all state-legitimating ideologies…) and totalitarianism (and implied in this relationship: education and media control.)… So voting matters… it just doesn’t matter in the way we’ve been told it matters. It’s not about ‘claiming our power’… as I heard one pundit say over the airwaves. Rather… it’s a defensive action… trying to hold totalitarianism (hard-core) at bay. Yes… we must… but… we must simultaneously take the offensive.

 

…Popper on the roots of totalitarian ideology in Plato…

…Townsend (and Bentham) on the centrality of coerced work to ‘power’s ability to maintain its Authority… its status and privilege – its ability to create the world it wants… based in its priorities… and the centrality of ‘coerced work’ to all ideologies of ‘class’…)

…in our discussion of how ‘democracy’ serves to legitimate ‘power’… what lies hidden – because never discussed – is ‘power’s construction of popular opinion… to maintain control of which requires the occasional re-sculpting of ‘Division’… in order to keep a solid majority of popular support behind it.

 

So voting matters… it just doesn’t matter in the way we’ve been told it matters. It’s not about ‘claiming our power’… as I heard one pundit say over the airwaves. Rather… it’s a defensive action… trying to hold totalitarianism (hard-core) at bay. Yes… we must… but… we must simultaneously take the offensive.

 

We are trying to show the necessary relationship (under ‘class’… given ‘power’…) between ‘democracy’ (and all state-legitimating ideologies…) and totalitarianism (and implied in this relationship: education and media control.)

 

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In Waking Up… when I described the mindset of ‘power’ (what I also called ‘the commercial imperative’… because that’s how it manifests in our lives…) as: “how does this affect ME!”… this is all of us. Repeatedly in these shows we’ve said, “we need to seize the initiative… craft an alternative… toward which young people – all of us – can aim our efforts… develop our ‘human-ness’…” – but this can’t happen when in ‘self-defense’ mode… when playing ‘power’s game of ‘in’… and ‘out’… naming some ‘family’… and everyone else: ‘not’. From ‘macro’ to ‘micro’… it’s a single corruption… that… ‘macro’ to ‘micro’… harms our compromised connections.

 

The goal of ‘power’… we’ve been arguing… is to keep we-the-people under control… and how is this accomplished if not by atomization – keeping us apart from each other… ignorant of each other’s lives – combined with a system of selective punishments and rewards… to ensure ‘good behavior’… – a tactic as old as class… as we saw when we considered the writing of Xenophon – with as many variations as contingencies of resistance to ‘power’.

 

So while ‘Division’ is a necessary tactic… for ‘power’… its form can be infinitely re-manifested – false distinctions can be infinitely invented… as… anyone… or anything… can be made a target… if suitable propaganda is provided… and if the necessary punishments and rewards are issued… then the base ‘insider – outsider’ mindset is protected.

 

– I.e., they’ll abandon any ‘ism’… if it no longer serves them. So if our goal is to be free of them… to move on to a future beyond coercion… it makes no sense to focus our efforts… on an ‘ism’.

(What are our bottom-lines? What are we willing to jettison? Who will take the first step… toward being strategic? Recall: the ‘power’-guys plan from the global vantage… and they play to their advantages – we can do the same.)

Because the key-con, “work is our common lot” is fundamental to their very existence… and anyone putting out an opposite message… given global and instantaneous communication… must… from their perspective… be stopped. But there is no other way home… than through the center of their hold… but how shake it… without empathy…

 

…which ‘power’ destroys so easily… with ‘hierarchy’… and manufacturing ‘scarcity’ – so easily forces us into judging and ranking ourselves against each other… scrambling for resources made… artificially… scarce.

 

In Waking Up… when I described the mindset of ‘power’ (what I also called ‘the commercial imperative’… because that’s how it manifests in our lives…) as: “how does this affect ME!”… this is all of us. Repeatedly in these shows we’ve said, “we need to seize the initiative… craft an alternative… toward which young people – all of us – can aim our efforts… develop our ‘human-ness’…” – but this can’t happen when in ‘self-defense’ mode… when playing ‘power’s game of ‘in’… and ‘out’… naming some ‘family’… and everyone else: ‘not’. From ‘macro’ to ‘micro’… it’s a single corruption… that… ‘macro’ to ‘micro’… harms our compromised connections.

 

‘Lack of empathy’s what stalls us… that’s totally what stalls us.

 

We have a ways to go… to empathy.

 

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Sisters and Brothers: Our ancestors have been silenced… we never get to speak (because they are all of us… you see… them is we…) and until very recently… I never thought about what that means… that we are… silenced by the grief for gifts aborted… …and the loss of a life lived true – Multiply that across the millennia – all the stolen lives… across ‘class’-time – the weight of their sorrow… the weight of their unmet ‘meant’… that aggregate… has come to tip the balance… back… to love. As to the ‘why’ of ‘power’s need to destroy… smash…what they never had… just to put it like that… provides the answer: to ‘prove’ there is no such thing… as ‘love’… that one didn’t not get… what others have full measure of.

 

Sisters and Brothers: Our ancestors have been silenced… we never get to speak (because they are all of us… you see… them is we…) and until very recently… I never thought about what that means… that we are…

 

…silenced by being forced to live falsely –

– silenced by the dust stuffed in our mouths… by the never-named…

– silenced by the theft of our connections…

…and by the lack of recognition…

– silenced by the grief for gifts aborted…

…and the loss of a life lived true –

 

Multiply that across the millennia –

– all the stolen lives… across ‘class’-time –

…the weight of their sorrow…

…the weight of their unmet ‘meant’…

…that aggregate…

…has come to tip the balance…

…back…

…to love.

 

–––

 

As to the ‘why’ of ‘power’s need to destroy… smash…what they never had… just to put it like that… provides the answer: to ‘prove’ there is no such thing… as ‘love’… that one didn’t not get… what others have full measure of.

 

–––

 

[Continuing with our reading of Chapter 18 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”… – P.S.]

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…and that… given that… uniformity of priorities… very little need be said amongst themselves… these ‘global-state-statesmen’… about their underlying motives… much agreement is tacit. Kissinger puts it like this: “International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions.” – “Financiers with Western European and North American exposures like Hjalmar Schacht, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, and others were not entirely trusted by Hitler…. Many of the Germans who ran I.G. Farben or the high-powered German subsidiaries of U.S. firms like Ford, General Motors, ITT, General Electric, and Standard Oil contributed to a “Keppler Leadership Circle” that funded SS chief Himmler and his resident-schemer-cum-intelligence chief, Walter Schellenberg…. Although the moral distinction between Hitler and Himmler was negligible, the latter kept up an off-and-on indirect dialogue with Allen Dulles and M16 about the separate peace that might be possible in U.S. eyes only if another German regime replaced Hitler.” (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)

 

The Soviet Solution

 

When the Soviets reinvaded Ukraine and Poland in 1944 and discovered the extent of the ethnic conflict there, they were alarmed. They certainly could not allow such chaos to disrupt their supply lines while the war was still going on – and since the UPA had also begun to attack Soviet formations, something had to be done to stabilize the situation.

 

Their solution was simple: if the different nationalities could not be made to live together peacefully on the same territory, then they should be separated.…

[…1944… the war was almost ending… think: ‘assessment for next steps’… and ‘cleanup operations’… and ‘pressing your advantages’… and “stage-setting in a revamped ‘Theater’”. What did we learn from Miklos is the first thought of ‘power’ in transition: ‘cover your ass with unsavory-fact-suppression…and by establishing a plausible invention.’ Once the writing was on the wall… the German state tried to wipe out all trace of its true motives: categorization… segregation… containment… and extermination. Now… after all we’ve been shown of ‘power’s M.O. – along the lines of “divide-and-control” – are we still unwilling to see… that “‘power’ is ‘power’ is ‘power’…” across the ‘class’-ages… across the ‘class’ ideologies… be in ‘communist’… ‘socialist’… or ‘democratic’?

 

…and that… given that… uniformity of priorities… very little need be said amongst themselves… these ‘global-state-statesmen’… about their underlying motives… much agreement is tacit. Kissinger puts it like this:

International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals. They represented a single elite society that spoke the same language (French), frequented the same salons, and pursued romantic liaisons in each other’s capitals. National interests of course varied, but in a world where a foreign minister could serve a monarch of another nationality (every Russian foreign minister until 1820 was recruited abroad), or when a territory could change its national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance, a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent. Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct. (World Order, p. 37 –8)

And let’s throw this into the mix:

Financiers with Western European and North American exposures like Hjalmar Schacht, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, and others were not entirely trusted by Hitler…. Many of the Germans who ran I.G. Farben or the high-powered German subsidiaries of U.S. firms like Ford, General Motors, ITT, General Electric, and Standard Oil contributed to a “Keppler Leadership Circle” that funded SS chief Himmler and his resident-schemer-cum-intelligence chief, Walter Schellenberg…. Although the moral distinction between Hitler and Himmler was negligible, the latter kept up an off-and-on indirect dialogue with Allen Dulles and M16 about the separate peace that might be possible in U.S. eyes only if another German regime replaced Hitler. (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, p. 192 – 3)

 

“This anecdote has been repeated by many historians, and has been interpreted variously as proof of Stalin’s ruthlessness, a demonstration of Roosevelt’s naivety and an illustration of Churchill’s growing powerlessness in the shadow of the other two. It is certainly President Roosevelt’s comments that are the most revealing, since they are the most unexpected. He does seem to have been taken with the idea of executing 50,000 German prisoners, since it was virtually the first thing he mentioned when the three men met again at their second conference, in Yalta just over a year later. If one takes Roosevelt’s comments at face value, and factor in the President’s well-known anti-German prejudice, then he begins to appear every bit as ruthless as Stalin.… What Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were discussing was the necessary flip side of the liberation: a process in which millions of Europeans would not be set free, but incarcerated; and many thousands not saved, but led to their deaths. Churchill, who always had an eye for posterity, understood that this was not a subject to be taken lightly. It was one thing for released slaves to be seen pursuing vengeance, but quite another for powerful world leaders.”

 

…as well as this anecdote Lowe shared earlier in the book:

In his multi-volume history of the conflict, Winston Churchill told a story… The episode occurred at the first conference of the ‘Big Three’ in Tehran at the end of 1943. Churchill was having dinner with Stalin and Roosevelt on the second day of the conference when Stalin proposed a toast to the liquidation of ‘at least 50,000, and perhaps 100,000 of the German Command Staff’. Churchill, who knew all about the mass shootings of Polish officers at Katyn at the beginning of the war, was disgusted by this remark, and stated baldly that the British people would never tolerate mass executions. When Stalin still insisted that 50,000 ‘must be shot’, Churchill could stand it no longer. ‘I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself,’ he said, ‘than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy.’

 

In an ill-judged attempt to lighten the tone, Roosevelt interjected at this point with a suggestion that they compromise on a smaller number to be shot, say, 49,000. It appears he meant this as a joke, but given what he also knew about Stalin’s past it was in very poor taste. Churchill was unable to make a reply before Roosevelt’s son Elliott, who was also present at the dinner, added his twopenn’orth. ‘Look,’ he said to Stalin, ‘when our armies start rolling in from the West, and your armies are still coming on from the east, we’ll be solving the whole thing, won’t we? Russian, American and British soldiers will settle the issue for most of those fifty thousand in battle, and I hope not only those fifty thousand war criminals will be taken care of but many hundreds of thousands more Nazis as well.’

 

At this, Stalin rose to his feet, embraced Elliott and clinked glasses with him. Churchill was dismayed. ‘Much as I love you, Elliott,’ he said, ‘I cannot forgive you for making such a dastardly statement. How dare you say such a thing!’ He got up and stormed out of the room, leaving Stalin and his Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to hurry after him with claims that he was taking things too seriously – they had all only been ‘playing’.

 

This anecdote has been repeated by many historians, and has been interpreted variously as proof of Stalin’s ruthlessness, a demonstration of Roosevelt’s naivety and an illustration of Churchill’s growing powerlessness in the shadow of the other two. It is certainly President Roosevelt’s comments that are the most revealing, since they are the most unexpected. He does seem to have been taken with the idea of executing 50,000 German prisoners, since it was virtually the first thing he mentioned when the three men met again at their second conference, in Yalta just over a year later. If one takes Roosevelt’s comments at face value, and factor in the President’s well-known anti-German prejudice, then he begins to appear every bit as ruthless as Stalin.

 

The treatment of German prisoners of war in 1945 has always been controversial because it calls into question the very values that the Allies claimed to be fighting for. What Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were discussing was the necessary flip side of the liberation: a process in which millions of Europeans would not be set free, but incarcerated; and many thousands not saved, but led to their deaths. Churchill, who always had an eye for posterity, understood that this was not a subject to be taken lightly. It was one thing for released slaves to be seen pursuing vengeance, but quite another for powerful world leaders. (p. 111 – 113)

“In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune had featured a front-page story headlined “Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank,” reporting that steel baron Fritz Thyssen had channeled the money into the Union Banking Corporation, possibly to be held for “Nazi big-wigs,” UBC was the bank, nominally owned by a Dutch intermediary, that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family. Prescott Bush was a director.” (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush) – …All of which suggests… a shift… a ‘power’-struggle… a culmination of a long transition… new terms for a new game: in which money is the only measure of place… total domination the goal… achieved through total consumption of the globe.

 

Lastly… this:

The U.S. Justice Department had begun probing German-connected companies and investors in 1941, but Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war against both Germany and Japan put government investigations into overdrive.

 

Secretary of War Stimson, a man with strong establishment ties – Andover, Yale, Skull and Bones, and service in both Republican and Democratic cabinets – asked President Roosevelt in March 1942 to stop the investigations because they would interfere with companies engaged in the war effort. However, that didn’t stop the inquiries being made by the alien property custodian under the Trading with the Enemy Act of December, 1941.

 

None of this would have been happy news for Prescott Bush at 59 Wall Street. In 1938, the firm had been collaterally involved in a German transaction – shipping tetraethyl lead needed by the Luftwaffe – by the Ethyl Corporation, of which Farish [‘William S. Farish, the publicly pilloried (for his company’s connections to I.G. Farben) chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey…’] was a director and which was half owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey. In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune had featured a front-page story headlined “Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank,” reporting that steel baron Fritz Thyssen had channeled the money into the Union Banking Corporation, possibly to be held for “Nazi big-wigs,” UBC was the bank, nominally owned by a Dutch intermediary, that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family. Prescott Bush was a director. (Phillips, p. 38 – 9)

All of which suggests… a shift… a ‘power’-struggle… a culmination of a long transition… new terms for a new game: in which money is the only measure of place… total domination the goal… achieved through total consumption of the globe.

“In the economic field,” one historian has written, “Hitler’s obsession was oil.” To Hitler, it was the vital commodity of the industrial age and for economic power. He read about it, he talked about it, he knew the history of the world’s oilfields. If the oil of the Caucasus – along with the “black earth,” the farmlands of the Ukraine – could be brought into the German empire, then Hitler’s New Order would have within its borders the resources to make it invulnerable.”(Yergin, quoted in Phillips) [As we’ll see when we consider Kissinger… the word ‘order’ is code for ‘total’… ‘totalitarian’… – ‘control of the populace’… leashed to serve the ‘greater good’ of a state’s race to finish in top place… write the story of the ‘human race’… depicting themselves as star players… ‘world-historic’ figures in the ‘World Supremacy’ game (but lost to them… is understanding of that true measure of ‘human-ness’… on which our continuance depends) – P.S.] “Simply put, World War II made government, business and the military larger, more permanent, and more powerful – and also obliged each to pay more attention to the other elements. Politically, this favored a conservative-leaning centrism – one that admitted the need of an active government but also promoted business interests.… The national security state, in short, concentrated economic power and favored business.” (Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)

 

In Germany, Adolf Hitler, who took power in 1933, had seen the perils of insufficient oil during his own wartime military service.… According to oil economist Daniel Yergin, Hitler prided himself in knowing more about economics than his generals did:

“In the economic field,” one historian has written, “Hitler’s obsession was oil.” To Hitler, it was the vital commodity of the industrial age and for economic power. He read about it, he talked about it, he knew the history of the world’s oilfields. If the oil of the Caucasus – along with the “black earth,” the farmlands of the Ukraine – could be brought into the German empire, then Hitler’s New Order would have within its borders the resources to make it invulnerable. [As we’ll see when we consider Kissinger… the word ‘order’ is code for ‘total’… ‘totalitarian’… – P.S.] In that conception, there was a striking similarity to the Japanese drive to encapsulate the resources of the East Indies and Southeast Asia within its empire, an ambition also powered by the belief that such a resource base would make it impregnable. Albert Speer, the German Minister for Armaments and War Production, said at his interrogation in May 1945, “the need for oil certainly was a prime motive” in the decision to invade Russia. (Yergin, quoted in Phillips, p. 251 – 2)

So… let’s view events… the Soviet ‘decision’… with the ‘whole’ in mind…

 

…all that had transpired prior to the Soviets ‘settling’ on ‘the solution’ to herd Ukrainians and Poles into separate boxes. ‘Contingent events’ or obvious evidence of ‘a plan’? Is this a question? – as if ‘control of the populace’… leashed to serve the ‘greater good’ of a state’s race to finish in top place… write the story of the ‘human race’… depicting themselves as star players… ‘world-historic’ figures in the ‘World Supremacy’ game (but lost to them… is understanding of that true measure of ‘human-ness’… on which our continuance depends) – as if ‘control of the populace’ as a focused project were not ‘Issue Numero Uno’ on ‘power’s ‘To Do’ list… since the French Revolution showed them what time it was. This is mos def one of those ‘tacit assumptions’ of modern-day ‘rule’.

 

The world was being partitioned – we were being boxed… the battle-lines were being drawn… the ‘World Supremacy’ game was being launched… the race to the top… was on.

 

In sum:

When the short post-World War II economic downturn in 1946 yielded to the vigor of a new arms race, the public began to understand that something was different. Peacetime was no longer all that peaceful. The gargantuan size and budgetary appetite of the new military-national security-industrial complex also meant a transformed economy. The statistics were awesome, and so was the technology and military power. Corporate profits blossomed in the sunshine.

 

Simply put, World War II made government, business and the military larger, more permanent, and more powerful – and also obliged each to pay more attention to the other elements. Politically, this favored a conservative-leaning centrism – one that admitted the need of an active government but also promoted business interests.… The national security state, in short, concentrated economic power and favored business. (Phillips, p. 195)

…This separation was to be done on a state-wide scale: the Poles should live in Poland, and the Ukrainians should live in a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

[So we see… how taking Lowe’s own advice… to step back and view the scene widely… is necessary… to not get sucked in… to the ‘masters’ framing… the one bestowed by Hobbs… which… we saw… resolves into the false notion that ‘Daddy’ is needed to step in… and end the children’s squabbling… – P.S.]

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* “WUR of November 9th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[From John Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe From Late Antiquity To The Renaissance]

 

(During the May 18, 2014 show, we finally remembered to add Alice Miller and Jeremy Bentham to the “puzzle pieces” we needed to see what ‘power’s plans are… and in the May 25, 2014 show we remembered John Boswell… for his The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe: From Late Antiquity To The Renaissance….)

 

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[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercial’ I’m planning:

 

“…this train called ‘class’… called ‘just sit back and enjoy the ride and let the big boys… “the important ones” … drive…’ is rolling downhill… and it’s got a speed to it… The story in which they ride our backs… that they call ‘Progress’… was written by ‘power’… who then strangles all other stories… cuts them off at the pass… as Plato instructed… It’s the fact that they had a story… a plan… that made them ‘powerful’… because it meant they had certainty’… and could move forward with conviction… we cannot get free unless we deeply believe… that our happiness is the point… our reason-to-be… our babies come to show us that… and then we give them our backs… it’s time to trust those toothless smiles they give us… trust… the flight and song of birds… the lolling sound of the ‘useless’ waves… It’s time to trust that joy is our birthright… and must always be the core of the new story we write… the story that is ‘the opposite’ of ‘power’… It only takes a few to begin to make this world based in trusting our bodies’ truth… in putting that first… based in letting our joy live. It only takes a few… and others will come to it. It only takes a few…and we are already many… It’s not the earth we must save… it’s ourselves… just put that first… and the earth can take care of herself…”]

 

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All over the world our fellows need our endorsement… our organizing to support them… and every second of every day… our bodies need the same. It is a single advocacy that’s called for today.… We have to start discussing the centrality of ‘work’ to everything… to our containment… and to, as well, our getting free… collectively… and individually.… And… a third thread: the ‘power’-guys… the global-state statesmen… very much like to continuously invent – Miklos showed us this – weapons of death. The same knowledge which in Nikola Tesla’s hands meant ‘life’… in theirs meant ‘death’ (they can sicken whole communities if they deem them ‘disobedient’… and we cannot allow this… we cannot wait… there is no more propitious moment than today… Weave these threads together… and we can be certain… many deaths we thought were ‘natural’… weren’t.

 

November 9th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: All over the world our fellows need our endorsement… our organizing to support them… and every second of every day… our bodies need the same. It is a single advocacy that’s called for today.

 

With the long echo of Tiananmen Square ringing in our ears… would we have the courage that we’re seeing in Hong Kong this day? If we had certainty that we carried the hopes of humanity for a world without coercion with us as we occupied… certainly… certainly we would.

 

Look at how they grew their courage: every moment discussing… thinking… planning… with each other… together physically. Is this not the pathway to our freedom?

 

I put up a ‘video’ of an empty chair with this message: “Let’s make some brief… filmed… in-roads into breaking those mind-locks that we let stop us.

 

Thank you Hong Kong for taking that leadership spot…

…thank you Catalonia for the same… in calling the question of your independence today…

…and to the youth of Mexico… thank you for your example in calling for a General Strike… truly… it’s only by consciously withdrawing our human energy that we strike a death-blow to this sick system.

 

We have to start discussing the centrality of ‘work’ to everything… to our containment… and to, as well, our getting free… collectively… and individually.

 

And on that note there is a shining example in the life of Tom Magliozzi… who, with his brother Ray, give the gift of laughter every week [on their radio show Car Talk…] a gift so needed to those of us in the belly of the beast – a death-worshipping beast. When I read his obit on their website I found his life was a great illustration of the fertility that happens when we trust our bodies’ truth… and listen to it. He couldn’t do the 9-to-5-grind… so he walked away… and in its place came the chance to share his gifts… because full gifts can’t be forced… don’t deliver under orders… refuse all schedules.

 

But his death also caused some thoughts that I’d had on this diagnosis of ‘Alzheimer’s’ to resurface. I had them first when I heard about that woman found dead in a hospital stairwell… here in the Bay Area. That started a thread… that led… back to the film discussion of Mr. Moskowitz on microwave radiation. Recall… one thing it said was some mice subjected to it developed ‘Alzheimer’-like symptoms (and ‘Attention-Deficit-Disorder’-like symptoms…) and then: the truth we’ve been shown repeatedly over the years… that ‘power’ likes to both ‘experiment’ – views us as its ‘test subjects’ – and is determined to weed out what they consider ‘the defective’… and ‘recalcitrant’… and the ‘redundant’… and simply what doesn’t ‘fit’ with their picture… of ‘the Republic’.

 

And… a third thread: the ‘power’-guys… the global-state statesmen… very much like to continuously invent – Miklos showed us this – weapons of death. The same knowledge which in Nikola Tesla’s hands meant ‘life’… in theirs meant ‘death’ (they can sicken whole communities if they deem them ‘disobedient’… and we cannot allow this… we cannot wait… there is no more propitious moment than today.)

 

Weave these threads together… and we can be certain… many deaths we thought were ‘natural’… weren’t.

 

–––

 

Sisters and Brothers: Imagine… if you can… the following scenario: a right-wing pundit… producing his own radio show, “In Front of the Propaganda” – and magazine, the “Right Business Observer”… pens and heartily propagates a hit-piece on the ‘next-Bush-in-succession’ for the ‘office’ of the U.S. President. Round the right-wing talk-show-circuit he goes… where he and his various hosts are completely simpatico… they settle in for a nice warm chat… and have themselves a good-old time trashing the ‘next-Bush’ ‘president-designate’. You can’t, can you? But a self-avowed ‘Left’ journalist has done just this… or rather… the ‘Left’ version of this – apparently to derail Hilary’s chances. Now why would he do this?

 

November 2nd, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: Imagine… if you can… the following scenario: a right-wing pundit… producing his own radio show, “In Front of the Propaganda” – and magazine, the “Right Business Observer”… pens and heartily propagates a hit-piece on the ‘next-Bush-in-succession’ for the ‘office’ of the U.S. President. Round the right-wing talk-show-circuit he goes… where he and his various hosts are completely simpatico… they settle in for a nice warm chat… and have themselves a good-old time trashing the ‘next-Bush’ ‘president-designate’.

 

You can’t, can you?

 

But a self-avowed ‘Left’ journalist has done just this… or rather… the ‘Left’ version of this – apparently to derail Hilary’s chances. Now why would he do this?

 

I seem to recall a couple years back his announcement that he’d been invited to some right-wing policy-camp – all expenses paid – his tone implied he was only going out of curiosity… to see what they were up to… not as a new… or old… recruit.

 

When I published Waking Up I didn’t know it but I was embarking on an exploration of ‘power’… both into its ‘theory’… with the discovery of Popper… and Bentham… in particular… and into their practices… with many of which I have been made personally acquainted.

 

I’ve learned since that there are layers and layers of schemes and schemers beneath the ‘presentation’ of a ‘pundit’… sometimes with their active complicity… and sometimes… I suppose… not.

 

The Henwood hit-piece was the subject of an interview with him that was airing on KPFA as I returned from the station this past Sunday (yesterday as I write this.)

 

What struck me… listening… was the contrast between his honey-pleasant tone and the nasty adjectives and accusations he unrelentingly dropped to describe her: liar… sneaky… concubine (as a euphemism… he wanted to be polite… he implied…)

 

His written word reads ‘mild’ by comparison… suggesting it serves largely as the trigger catapulting him around the left forum-circuit to reach his target audience… because he has a target audience.

 

Few of us will take the time or expend the bucks to read Doug Henwood’s piece in the November 2014 Harper’s Magazine – and among those who do… few will take the time to plunge into the propagandistic tricks that explain the otherwise curious unstated premises that he makes such liberal use of… – but a great many folk… standing in line with their groceries will see its headline blazoned across their day… to stick… at least so hope the folks who orchestrated this… in their minds… so to lubricate future prejudice. (In listening to mid-term Election Day coverage on the 4th I heard a Republican politician use the same language in referring to the Democrats as was used in the title of his piece… and… knowing as we do the extreme attention ‘power’ gives to word-selection… I find this concurrent use… suggestive….)

 

He begins with a quote from Sarah Palin… and then mirrors its snide tone throughout the article. ‘Contempt’ is the word that comes to mind when I think of him… a style I associate with the Plato's Tribesmen.

“How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” Sarah Palin asked American voters in a taunting 2010 speech. The answer: Not so well. We avoided a full-blown depression, but the job market remains deeply sick, and it’s become quite mainstream to talk about the U.S. economy having fallen into structural stagnation (though the rich are thriving). Barack Obama has, if anything, seemed more secretive than George W. Bush. He kills alleged terrorists whom his predecessor would merely have tortured. The climate crisis gets worse, and the political capacity even to talk about it, much less do anything about it, is completely absent. These aren’t the complaints Palin would make, of course. But people who voted for Obama in 2008 were imagining a more peaceful, more egalitarian world, and they haven’t gotten it.

 

Be of good cheer, though. Many savants – and not all of them Democrats – have a solution for 2016. That would be putting Hillary Clinton in the White House.

 

What is the case for Hillary…? It boils down to this: She has experience, she’s a woman, and it’s her turn. It’s hard to find any substantive political argument in her favor…. What Hillary will deliver, then, is more of the same. And that shouldn’t surprise us. As wacky as it sometimes appears on the surface, American politics has an amazing stability and continuity about it….

He then takes us on a brief tour of recent U.S. economic history… focusing blame on Presidents Reagan and Clinton… Now… there’s a lot wrong with this picture… especially given that Henwood’s specialty is ‘economics’.

 

He then takes us on a brief tour of recent U.S. economic history… focusing blame on Presidents Reagan and Clinton:

After the caretaker George H.W. Bush administration evaporated, Bill Clinton took over and, with a few minor adjustments, kept the party going for another decade. Profits skyrocketed, as did the financial markets.

 

But there was a contradiction under it all: a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption for both economic dynamism and political legitimacy has a problem when mass purchasing power is squeezed. For a few decades, consumers borrowed to make up for what their paychecks were lacking. But that model broke down once and for all with the crisis of 2008. Today we desperately need a new political economy — one that features a more equal distribution of income, investment in our rotting social and physical infrastructure, and a more humane ethic. We also need a judicious foreign policy, and a commander-in-chief who will resist the instant gratification of air strikes and rhetorical bluster.

 

Is Hillary Clinton the answer to these prayers? It’s hard to think so, despite the widespread liberal fantasy of her as a progressive paragon, who will follow through exactly as Barack Obama did not. In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great expectations.

Now… there’s a lot wrong with this picture… especially given that Henwood’s specialty is ‘economics’.

 

I credit Wallerstein (I quote his words near the beginning of Waking Up… and discuss them on the page: “Occupying Our Commons”…) for breaking the logjam of dense propaganda on ‘economics’… by helping us see… as regards ‘the economy’… that it is only from the vantage of ‘the whole’… that the truth may be known… Henwood (and Richard Wolff… Robert Reich… et al.) feed the logjam.… It’s very important that we understand ‘power’s goal (intermediate goal… though central to its control [of us…]): to ensure that none of us have anything of our own (and by ‘us’… I mean we-the-people….) Getting clear on this is basic for our task of discrimination… between honest and false actors… among the pundits: those who lead us true… and those who are there… not to…

 

[My reading and writing is being strongly ‘discouraged’ (and of course my online access – which often occurs only when my son is here… and yesterday… when I wrote those words… he had just left the house [at which point the physical effects I associate with microwave radiation grew more intense…] but today… not even his presence made a difference…) – so… please… bear with me… – P.S.]

 

While I credit Wallerstein (I quote his words near the beginning of Waking Up… and discuss them on the page: “Occupying Our Commons”… under the heading, “Immanuel’s Heads Up!”) for breaking the logjam of dense propaganda on ‘economics’… by helping us see… as regards ‘the economy’… that it is only from the vantage of ‘the whole’… that the truth may be known… Henwood (and Richard Wolff… Robert Reich… et al.) feed the logjam.

 

When Henwood says, “‘How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?’… The answer: Not so well. We avoided a full-blown depression, but the job market remains deeply sick, and it’s become quite mainstream to talk about the U.S. economy having fallen into structural stagnation (though the rich are thriving)… But people who voted for Obama in 2008 were imagining a more peaceful, more egalitarian world, and they haven’t gotten it…” he misleads multiply… misdirecting our eyes away from the ‘world system’… while implying that that mega-monster is moved at the behest… of a U.S. president.

 

His misdirection – which… given his Right-wing connections… I suspect is not unconscious, knee-jerk regurgitation of his training – seems to be the point of his radio-show. “Get out of your houses… get thee to apartments…” he advised in the midst of the financial crisis. “Just let go… enjoy the ‘freedom’… of owning nothing…” Except… a home means access to more than mere shelter. It offers the possibility of (under the table) self-sufficiency – there are many ways a home can generate ‘economic’ activity… and… not the least way being: it means access to earth… and earth means access to food… and food is as basic as it gets.

 

It’s very important that we understand ‘power’s goal (intermediate goal… though central to its control [of us…]): to ensure that none of us have anything of our own (and by ‘us’… I mean we-the-people….) Getting clear on this is basic for our task of discrimination… between honest and false actors… among the pundits: those who lead us true… and those who are there… not to.

 

The second thing we must be clear on… is that they operate through infiltration… they make their moves clandestine… and they don’t play by any rules. This means that we have no way of knowing the back-story generating the effects… that the media dutifully broadcasts… How to say this? How to discuss ‘invisible agents’ – what is intentionally hidden… kept under wraps… secret – done by a Tribe that prides itself on being able to keep a secret – without so doing being used to discredit? I caught the end of a similar discussion just today. Bobby Seale was telling the story of Cointelpro-infiltration of the Black Panther Party… saying that some folks who were subjected to its tactics are still experiencing PTSD… because they were never able to talk about it, “I mean… you had agent provocateurs that would actually marry and have a child with someone in the Party… because they were ordered to! Who would do that?…” You see his point… this tactic? The ‘shadow-state’… the hidden totalitarians… do what is clearly insane (and Auschwitz is but the most extreme illustration of it…) and count on our not being able to believe that fellow human beings could do such things.… Silence birthing more silence… a circular toxicity… that works only so long as we don’t have certainty… so long as we don’t own our body’s truth… and know… that the world we want stands opposite to this… reign of falseness.

 

The second thing we must be clear on… is that they operate through infiltration… they make their moves clandestine… and they don’t play by any rules. This means that we have no way of knowing the back-story generating the effects… that the media dutifully broadcasts…

 

…and which ‘power’ predictably uses – these effects – … to further its interests… which makes Henwood’s interpretation of Hillary’s experience extremely suspect:

The Clintons had outgrown Arkansas. Bill contemplated running for president in 1988 but decided not to… But four years later, he found his nerve. There were still plenty of skeletons in the closet, of course. An internal campaign memo from March 1992 […which became ‘not so internal’…Mr. Henwood doesn’t mention how that memo got ‘not so internal’ – P.S.…] listed more than seventy-five potential problems for the candidacy….

 

He won anyway…. They settled into something resembling a copresidency, […don’t you hate this?… women grate at this… you cannot be ‘big’ in this system if you’re a woman and not be accused of being a… bitch… – P.S.…] with Hillary exercising an influence no previous First Lady ever had. And she caused trouble right from the start. Always suspicious of the media, she shut off reporters’ access to the West Wing of the White House. It ended up alienating the press to no good effect….

How to say this? How to discuss ‘invisible agents’ […this is a tactic that has always worked for them… for ‘power’… like a charm… shuts us up always… and then of course we got the journalists telling us “if you can’t prove it don’t talk about it because it trivializes or cheapens the whole project – shuts us up… it does… indeed. We gotta get past that… we do… and the way we get past that is knowing what we want… and going for it… as single-minded of purpose as they are… … – P.S.…] – so how to discuss what can’t be ‘proven’… what is intentionally hidden… kept under wraps… secret – done by a Tribe that prides itself on being able to keep a secret – without so doing being used to discredit? I caught the end of a similar discussion just today. Bobby Seale was telling the story of Cointelpro-infiltration of the Black Panther Party… saying that some folks who were subjected to its tactics are still experiencing PTSD… because they were never able to talk about it, […I mean… think about it… how hideous this is. Remember how folks could not believe… and would not accept… that Richard Aoki had been recruited as a child… essentially… as a child… and they’re doing that yet… they’ve never stopped… that’s also not talked about: our children are being set up to be the future ‘Richard Aoki’s… laying out their military uniform… whatever they think symbolizes their ‘duty’ to the state… alongside whatever uniform symbolizes… what won their heart… despite. We have to start trusting what we know in our hearts is true: the world around us is completely manufactured… false… artificial… constructed to serve something that’s ignoble: a death-worshipping mindset… – P.S.…] “I mean… you had agent provocateurs that would actually marry and have a child with someone in the Party… because they were ordered to! Who would do that?…” You see his point… this tactic? The ‘shadow-state’… the hidden totalitarians… do what is clearly insane (and Auschwitz is but the most extreme illustration of it…) and count on our not being able to believe that fellow human beings could do such things.

 

Silence birthing more silence… a circular toxicity… that works only so long as we don’t have certainty… so long as we don’t own our body’s truth… and know… that the world we want stands opposite to this… reign of falseness.

I’m looking at this angle called ‘clandestine’… that manifests as ‘what-is-never-spoken-but-which-our-bodies-feel’: that all around us seethes… from ‘power’s hidden actors… a festering excrescence… that saps our energy and poisons our relations with… everything: the earth… our own breathing… our knowledge of ourselves and each other – when nothing is what it claims to be… or what it seems.… A Daily Californian (the student paper of UC – Berkeley) article (of October 31, 2014) addresses this on the (my) local level… entitled: “City Council OKs Department Agreements”. One of these agreements is for mutual aid between the military and law enforcement – as well as with other departments – at every level of government in the conduct of government surveillance of ‘suspicious persons’.… There was some controversy at the meeting… because there are SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) – requesting the devotion of City resources to the surveillance of the person named – that pertain to folks who are targeted only for their speech… So is this the legal authority for hounding people?…

 

(Our cage has many sides… and each time one stands in sharp relief I think… this one is most key… the core block to break: ‘atomization’, e.g.… and ‘blowing-up-big our conversations as to the ‘opposite’ of ‘power’… and therefore getting clear on our ‘opposite’ vision’ – but all sides of our containment share a common wall: the lock on our thoughts ‘power’ holds that makes ‘division’… rank… hierarchy… Authority… ‘the state’… seem legitimate. But there is, I think, sense in… a usefulness for our task of gaining our freedom… to… teasing out the ways this ‘mind-lock’ works… the tactics ‘power’ uses to accomplish it – because our experiences are so diverse… and the ‘mind-lock’ manifests in different ways. So it helps more of us to see it… and we see more of it… if we view it variously… from different angles.

 

And today… I’m looking at this angle called ‘clandestine’… that manifests as ‘what-is-never-spoken-but-which-our-bodies-feel’: that all around us seethes… from ‘power’s hidden actors… a festering excrescence… that saps our energy and poisons our relations with… everything: the earth… our own breathing… our knowledge of ourselves and each other – when nothing is what it claims to be… or what it seems.

 

There are – and this is hard for us to accept – untold numbers of hidden folks who devote their earth-given gifts to simply causing hardship… misery… and sadness… at the behest of ‘masters’ who… at a whim… would wipe their collective ass with them… and all utterly hidden… yet brewing toxic seas of unspoken hidden disease in our relations… deepening and spreading to an increasing degree in proportion to our starting to think authentically… and sharing our questing with the world…

 

And we have to understand they also infiltrate in numbers that connote ‘invasion’… into regions – like the Bay Area – formerly progressive. And if you live in one of them… you can’t help but notice the seemingly unaccountable and perplexingly large influx… of trucks and vans and buses (decorated as if to say “ain’t nothing here but us hippies…) bringing in the troops….

 

So… we have to understand… the Plato’s Tribesmen (and women) are determined to make the reality they want. (There’s a character in Titanic who symbolizes well ‘power’s mindset. As the ship is sinking ‘his man’ says to him, “Good luck…” to which he replies, “I make my own luck.”)

 

It’s time to acknowledge… not just their existence… but the full implications of their existence.

 

A Daily Californian (the student paper of UC – Berkeley) article (of October 31, 2014) addresses this on the (my) local level… entitled: “City Council OKs Department Agreements”. One of these agreements is for mutual aid between the military and law enforcement – as well as with other departments – at every level of government in the conduct of government surveillance of ‘suspicious persons’.

 

There was some controversy at the meeting… because there are SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) – requesting the devotion of City resources to the surveillance of the person named – that pertain to folks who are targeted only for their speech… i.e. they are not engaged in criminal activity… but who… for instance… may advocate… as the Declaration of Independence recommends… that we begin discussions of whether a deeply entrenched system of privilege for the few… of harnessing coerced human energy – a system designed to force us to submit to its Authority… by suppressing dissent… allows its ‘subjects’… to pursue happiness.

 

So is this the legal authority…? By this logic the ‘Founding Fathers’ would be subjected to surveillance… tracking… and targeting with weapons that attempt to deliver death… quietly… no noise (Fascists are big on “no muss… no fuss…”) And we see too… the Council’s unspoken complicity… plausible deniability… and ditto for the army of folks – my son said recently that to drive for Uber you just need a cell phone and an app – and it could be as simple as that… you get your marching orders delivered digitally… you contribute your small bit to the whole – no muss… no fuss… but it’s a slippery slope… this “just following orders…” isn’t it?… as ‘the state’… as we’re seeing in our Savage Continent reading… wields an Authority most Arbitrary… can order you to do most dastardly things – because they can – and we obey because we’ve been so well-trained in “might makes right”: the bully-parent becomes the bully-state […one of the themes of a new film: By the Side of the Road…]

 

So is this the legal authority for hounding people? By this logic the ‘Founding Fathers’ would be subjected to surveillance… tracking… and targeting with weapons that attempt to deliver death… quietly… no noise (Fascists are big on “no muss… no fuss…”)

 

And we see too… the Council’s unspoken complicity… plausible deniability… and ditto for the army of folks – my son said recently that to drive for Uber you just need a cell phone and an app – and it could be as simple as that… you get your marching orders delivered digitally… you contribute your small bit to the whole – no muss… no fuss… but it’s a slippery slope… this “just following orders…” isn’t it?… as ‘the state’… as we’re seeing in our Savage Continent reading… wields an Authority most Arbitrary… can order you to do most dastardly things – because they can – and we obey because we’ve been so well-trained in “might makes right”: the bully-parent becomes the bully-state […one of the themes of a new film: By the Side of the Road…]

 

[Forgive the rough-cut writing… no internet connection at home… so... I'll tie things together later.]

 

Police are… somewhat… oddly… akin to us ‘throw-aways-don’t-matters’… in that they tend to know what happens around them… because they pay attention.

 

So when I hear a brother fighting against the surveillance-use of drones in L.A. (this was on the November 6, 2014 edition of the radio program Uprisings…) say that there are ‘ghost-police cars’ there – i.e. police cruisers that on record are patrolling while their drivers sit at desks – what I suspect… is that they are being benched to prevent their being witnesses…

 

Plausible deniability…)

“How to say this” also because I’m not trying to suggest that Hillary is not a political animal… in the same sense as are the global-state statesmen…. After all… they made her… they made all of us. All of us have been trained to hustle… to try to ‘get over’… in a system of ‘power’ that seeks to consume us. So Henwood’s accusations against her apply to any one of us… and certainly to him. No. The point… the sole point of this hit-piece… is that Hillary can win. And so what should concern us deeply… is the elaborate orchestration going on to sink her before she’s even entered the water…. And what should chill us… and move in us the same… but counter… sense of urgency with which ‘power’ moves to retake the U.S. presidency… is that ‘orchestration’ means ‘plan’… means a ‘goal’ in the making that we do not want to see become ‘reality’…

 

“How to say this” also because I’m not trying to suggest that Hillary is not a political animal… in the same sense as are the global-state statesmen…. After all… they made her… they made all of us. All of us have been trained to hustle… to try to ‘get over’… in a system of ‘power’ that seeks to consume us. So Henwood’s accusations against her apply to any one of us… and certainly to him.

 

No. The point… the sole point of this hit-piece… is that Hillary can win. And so what should concern us deeply… is the elaborate orchestration going on to sink her before she’s even entered the water…. And what should chill us… and move in us the same… but counter… sense of urgency with which ‘power’ moves to retake the U.S. presidency… is that ‘orchestration’ means ‘plan’… means a ‘goal’ in the making that we do not want to see become ‘reality’…

 

…which is why… I believe… we must get behind Hillary… because ‘power’… clearly… fears her…

 

…and I think… if we consider the matter… we can see why.

(By the by… we have our freedom on the line… so… please… no talk of ‘third parties’… ‘power’ salivates at the thought… and we know the ‘why’ of this no less… Recall: this is a moment like no other in the human story… under ‘class’… we are transitioning… not to some ‘new’-old iteration of ‘rule’… but to getting our lives back.)

–––

 

[Continuing with our reading of Chapter 18 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”… – P.S.]

–––

 

“As early as November 1943, when Churchill and Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time at Tehran, they both indicated to him that they would not oppose his plans to incorporate the eastern borderlands of Poland into the Soviet Union. Churchill made no secret of this, and tried soon after to convince the Polish Prime Minister, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, to accept this as a fait accompli – something that Mikolajczyk steadfastly refused to do. Roosevelt was more calculating, however, and did not make his position clear until after he was re-elected the following year; because he was relying on the support of millions of Polish-American voters. The final blow to Polish hopes on the subject came at the next meeting of the Big Three at Yalta in February 1945, when they jointly and formally declared that the eastern frontier of Poland should follow the Curzon Line… The tragic thing about this process is that it was pushed through without any reference to the wishes of the Polish people themselves…” [‘Tragic’… certainly… but better deemed ‘tragedy’… perhaps – to help us better see the ‘global-statesmen’… and ourselves. Our lives under ‘class’… under the regime of ‘rule’ are, truly, sad… but our sadness is routine… for ‘power’… if not for us… Under ‘class’… the contempt that ‘global-state-statesmen’ have for us proceeds without cessation… till we get clear on its opposite… and therefore have the certainty we need to plan the end of this sick system… – P.S.]

 

The Soviet Solution

 

When the Soviets reinvaded Ukraine and Poland in 1944 and discovered the extent of the ethnic conflict there, they were alarmed. They certainly could not allow such chaos to disrupt their supply lines while the war was still going on – and since the UPA had also begun to attack Soviet formations, something had to be done to stabilize the situation.

 

Their solution was simple: if the different nationalities could not be made to live together peacefully on the same territory, then they should be separated. This separation was to be done on a state-wide scale: the Poles should live in Poland, and the Ukrainians should live in a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

 

The demarcation line between the two would not be the old Polish border from the 1930s: it would be moved westwards, so that most of what Ukrainians regarded as ‘Western Ukraine’ would be reunited with ‘Eastern Ukraine’. This would not only extend Soviet territory, but would steal the thunder of the OUN/UPA by giving Ukrainians the very thing they had been fighting for. Any Poles living on the wrong side of this border would be expelled into Poland; and likewise, Ukrainians on the other side of the border would be ‘repatriated.’

 

To say this was a controversial solution at the time would be a gross understatement. For the Polish government in exile in London the idea of changing the Ukrainian/Polish border so far westwards was virtually unthinkable. The border that the Soviets proposed was the so-called Curzon Line, which would see an area the combined size of all three Baltic States –Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – severed from eastern Poland. The Polish city of Lwow would be awarded to Ukraine, Brest-Litovsk given to Belarus, and Wilno (modern-day Vilnius) handed over to Lithuania. To agree to such a border would be effectively to endorse the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

 

On the face of it the Western Allies were also opposed to such a solution. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had previously expressed outrage at any suggestion that the Soviets should be allowed to hold on to this territory. And yet both politicians were realists, and knew that it would be virtually impossible to oppose Soviet plans now that they already occupied the whole region. The price of challenging Stalin over the issue was not one that either premier was willing to contemplate. ‘Do you want me to go to war with Russia?’ said Roosevelt sharply when his ambassador to Poland suggested that America should stand firm on the subject.

 

As early as November 1943, when Churchill and Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time at Tehran, they both indicated to him that they would not oppose his plans to incorporate the eastern borderlands of Poland into the Soviet Union. Churchill made no secret of this, and tried soon after to convince the Polish Prime Minister, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, to accept this as a fait accompli – something that Mikolajczyk steadfastly refused to do. Roosevelt was more calculating, however, and did not make his position clear until after he was re-elected the following year; because he was relying on the support of millions of Polish-American voters. The final blow to Polish hopes on the subject came at the next meeting of the Big Three at Yalta in February 1945, when they jointly and formally declared that the eastern frontier of Poland should follow the Curzon Line.

 

The tragic thing about this process is that it was pushed through without any reference to the wishes of the Polish people themselves. Not even their elected representatives were consulted until after the deal had been struck in Tehran….

[‘Tragic’… certainly… but better deemed ‘tragedy’… perhaps – to help us better see the ‘global-statesmen’… and ourselves. Our lives under ‘class’… under the regime of ‘rule’ are, truly, sad… but our sadness is routine… for ‘power’… if not for us (as we will never resign ourselves to its limits.) Our lives under ‘class’ are replete with the tragic… but… arguably… may be better seen as fragments of a massive… because unnecessary… tragedy. There’s a great line in a wonderful film called Educating Rita… in which the Professor of English Literature explains to his class, “What distinguishes ‘tragedy’ from the merely ‘tragic’… is inevitability…”

 

Under ‘class’… the contempt that ‘global-state-statesmen’ have for us proceeds without cessation… till we get clear on its opposite… and therefore have the certainty we need to plan the end of this sick system… – P.S.]

“For Poles the world over, this was nothing short of an Anglo-American betrayal. When Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 they had promised never to endorse any territorial changes ‘that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’; by agreeing to Soviet demands at Tehran and Yalta they had explicitly broken that promise… the Labour MP John Rhys Davies stated bitterly in the House of Commons, ‘We started this war with great motives and high ideals. We published the Atlantic Charter and then spat on it, stomped on it and burnt it, as it were, at the stake, and now nothing is left of it.’…” “The eastern border of Poland was not the only one to move in 1945. When the Big Three met at Tehran they also discussed what would happen to Poland’s western border…. Once again, there was no consultation of the ‘freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’… [the people in] areas that had been considered German for hundreds of years…almost exclusively… German people – more than 11 million of them… it was understood… would have to be removed…” [We have been arguing… that under the regime of ‘class’… things don’t “just happen”… particularly since the Plato’s Tribesmen became very conscious sculptors of their notion of their debt to them: to one day realize his vision of ‘the Republic’… Now… all of this depends on tightly controlled populations… all of this depends on our suppressing our own self-given ambitions… and making of ourselves… soft clay… in the hands of ‘statesmen’ – a mistake… we could not help but make… because we have been keep apart from each other… until today… – P.S.]

 

…For Poles the world over, this was nothing short of an Anglo-American betrayal. When Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 they had promised never to endorse any territorial changes ‘that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’; by agreeing to Soviet demands at Tehran and Yalta they had explicitly broken that promise. There were many within the British and American establishment who shared these feelings. Arthur Bliss Lane, the US ambassador to Poland, openly called it a ‘capitulation’ to Stalin, a policy of ‘appeasement’ that was similar to the appeasement of Hitler before the war, and a ‘betrayal’ of America’s Polish allies. In Britain, the Labour MP John Rhys Davies stated bitterly in the House of Commons, ‘We started this war with great motives and high ideals. We published the Atlantic Charter and then spat on it, stomped on it and burnt it, as it were, at the stake, and now nothing is left of it.’

 

Forced ‘Repatriation’

 

Very little thought was given at Yalta to just what this change of borders would mean for the population of the region: it was regarded as Stalin’s own business, and not something that the Western Allies could realistically influence. In fact, the Soviets had already started to arrest and deport people according to their usual methods almost as soon as they had arrived in the area. But Stalin remained cautious, and the wholesale deportation of Poles did not begin in earnest until the Yalta Agreement was signed.

 

This was something quite new, as far as the Soviets were concerned. The Soviets were well acquainted with deporting whole populations from one region to another for reasons of nationality. Throughout the 1920s and 30s entire communities in the Soviet Union had been moved like pieces on a chessboard. The most recent such move had been the deportation of the Tatars from the Crimea (which at the time was not a part of Ukraine) in May 1944. However, until now such deportations had always been carried out for political or military rather than purely ethnic reasons. Moreover, they had only ever been conducted within Soviet territory – the Soviets had never before expelled an ethnic minority from their territory into another country. The population exchange that was to take place between Ukraine and Poland therefore reflected a marked change in Soviet policy.

[We have been arguing… that under the regime of ‘class’… things don’t “just happen”… particularly since the Plato’s Tribesmen became very conscious sculptors of their notion of their debt to him: to one day realize his vision of ‘the Republic’. Recall what we learned from Martin Bernal: that the self-elevated ‘rulers’ of the new ‘global order’ that began to form with the ‘Western’ embrace of the 19th century ‘international gold standard’ (this last we learned that from Karl Polanyi…) that the very self-conscious global-statesmen were training their children both to pursue ‘Perfection’ (a.k.a. ‘Supremacy’) as the goal of states (which also became the whip with which they herd us…) and… thumping their Hegelian Bible on lecterns within elite educational institutions… to craft a unique… and superior… ‘national character’… to launch into the global competition. Now… all of this depends on tightly controlled populations… all of this depends on our suppressing our own self-given ambitions… and making of ourselves… soft clay… in the hands of ‘statesmen’ – a mistake… we could not help but make… because we have been keep apart from each other… until today…

 

While our Savage Continent reading concludes with the chapter we’re currently reading – Chapter 18 – let’s consider this from the next chapter, “The Expulsion of the Germans”:

“The eastern border of Poland was not the only one to move in 1945. When the Big Three met at Tehran they also discussed what would happen to Poland’s western border…. Once again, there was no consultation of the ‘freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’, as promised by the Atlantic Charter…. [the people in] areas that had been considered German for hundreds of years…almost exclusively… German people – more than 11 million of them… it was understood by all parties that these Germans would have to be removed… According to Soviet plans all these people would either be conscripted as forced labour to pay off German war reparations, or be removed…” – P.S.]

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[Sergei Konionkov’s To Those Who Fell Fighting for the Cause of Peace and the Brotherhood of Nations (1918) (…floating in a Goya sky… “as Peace should still her wheaten garland wear… (Hamlet, V. 2.41)]

 

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* “WUR of November 16th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[From Jean-Leon Gerome’s The Slave Market, (early 1860s)]

 

(During the May 18, 2014 show, we finally remembered to add Alice Miller and Jeremy Bentham to the “puzzle pieces” we needed to see what ‘power’s plans are… and in the May 25, 2014 show we remembered John Boswell… for his The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe: From Late Antiquity To The Renaissance….)

 

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[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercials’ I’m planning:

 

“These cons – “people are violent…” “industry is ruthless…” “the security of the nation is threatened…” “‘global warming’ means we need ‘the state’… – are all presented to us as disparate… to encourage and reinforce our fragmentation – and deep confusion – when in truth all are weaves from the single thread of coercion… and all reflect the state’s need to seem legitimate… …and [relatedly…] its need to keep divisions – particularly hierarchical ones (are any not?) – well-sown between us. So certain ‘demographics’ – slotted categories of ‘class’-humans – will be presented as ‘more violent’ than others… while the middle ranks of ‘knowledge workers’ are reassured they don’t abandon their children – oh no… not them – because ‘studies show’ they ‘spend’ more time with their children than did their mothers – as if the hyper-scrutiny and over-management and deep training in hierarchy and ‘class’-service – ‘work’… it’s true… our parents were less dedicated to – as if this heightened surveillance and obedience-training they give their children were… somehow… not abandonment…. Remember that illustration from Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood in which a young vacationing-couple are enjoying ice cream cones… while their toddler cried? Well, that’s what Alice Miller means by – one example at least of – ‘abandonment’. So let us not be duped by the propaganda over the airwaves… which is trying to implant in our minds a very literal meaning for that word. No. ‘Child abandonment’ is a broad category that includes ‘training your children to be obedient’…”]

 

“I happened upon a journal entry (of 04.02.06) from 8 years ago in which I was pretty much resigned to my captive status… …resigned to not living my gifts… accepting their relinquishment… in exchange for an insecure… tenuous… always conditional ‘security’… and a bit of ‘entertainment’. My body knew I was being lied to… but I couldn’t see a way out of it… because there is no individual solution… not for an individual person… or an individual nation. We are one – all of us – being masticated or managed together… on that shifting plate. I use that metaphor a lot… and the last time I forgot… to attribute… and give thanks: Fame is fickle food… Upon a shifting plate… Whose table once a… Guest but not… The second time is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect… And with ironic caw… Flap past it to the… Farmer’s corn – Men eat of it and die.” (Emily Dickinson, # 1659)

 

“During the Great Depression here in the U.S. folks were paid to travel across the South to gather from former captives their memories of captivity (and I hate that word ‘slave’… it assumes facts not in evidence: that there is such a thing. My use of it in my very first blog was to say: “if you apply that concept to one… apply it to everyone … we are all in the same boat…” Trust. We are all in Auschwitz. No matter what nice upholstery they give us for the particular cage we’re stuck in. And it’s simply ‘betrayal’ to pretend otherwise.) What if we started gathering our visions of freedom and good fellowship… and the ‘infrastructure’ that supports it… collecting these visions from each other globally?… information-gathering for founding a free… globally-consciously-interconnecting society… for a purpose that we have made – we-the-people… globally…”]

 

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[November 17, 2014: Apologies… my internet connection has been (by design) interrupted all day… – P.S.]

 

It’s time to tackle this misguided notion of ‘the intelligent ones’ – as identified and represented by… ‘the state’ – holding ‘the ignorant’… at bay. This may be the founding lie of ‘class’… the key ‘false premise’. And it’s interesting that inserting but this one truth: “we are all… each one… brilliant…” into whatever shaky edifice of convoluted ‘class’-defending logic that you want… and down it comes. And though we’re closer to that moment – when ‘shaky edifice’ meets the truth – than at any other time in our ‘history’ under ‘class’… we’re not there yet.

 

November 11th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: It’s time to tackle this misguided notion of ‘the intelligent ones’ – as identified and represented by… ‘the state’ – holding ‘the ignorant’… at bay. This may be the founding lie of ‘class’… the key ‘false premise’. And it’s interesting that inserting but this one truth: “we are all… each one… brilliant…” into whatever shaky edifice of convoluted ‘class’-defending logic that you want… and down it comes. And though we’re closer to that moment – when ‘shaky edifice’ meets the truth – than at any other time in our ‘history’ under ‘class’… we’re not there yet.

 

And while I’ve definitely noticed… particularly in recent years – and with youth taking the lead on this – some measure of growth in the thinking of ‘progressives’ toward overcoming false divisions… this necessary bridging of state-prescribed and enforced distinctions… the overcoming of which means we overcome atomization… after which… “do not pass ‘go’… proceed directly to our freedom…”

 

……we seem to still be mired in a ‘class’-inspired concept of “the division of labor”… i.e. one derived from a belief in ‘hierarchy’… that crosses… and artificially layers… all regions of ‘ability’ – while simultaneously infusing all with an insincere rhetoric (ideology) of “we’re all equal…” “everyone’s important…” – classic language ‘rulers’ and their servants have long relied on to ‘sooth’ (pacify) we-the-people. So, for instance, Indonesia’s new president imagines he’s being beneficent when… in acknowledging the existence of the ‘lowly’ among his countrymen (and women)… he says (in essence): “all are needed… play your position… work! work! work!… so we can expand the economy!…”

 

All our ancestors… and all of us… have been told the same… all our ancestors… worked and hurried and hassled into early graves…

 

These thoughts come in reaction to a bombardment of recent propaganda on the supposed dangerousness… apathy… stupidity and cupidity of our fellows globally. As the media is ‘power’s ‘training means’… what gets repeated shows the areas where ‘power’ thinks our training is deficient… either because it sees the hold of core-cons slipping… or because a new ‘threat’ (to ‘power’) has emerged that it wants to address.

 

…if they were hot on this issue of predicting where resistance… dissent… may arise forty-five years ago… imagine where we are today – we-the-people – we-the-people are in that warming water that has become very hot indeed… and we-frogs need to start jumping out of it…

 

Of course when I say ‘new threat’… I mean ‘old’. Let’s look at the state’s reaction the last time large numbers of youth got active.

Beyond these purely hometown activities, there were interconnected efforts to beef up state and federal repressive apparatuses. Following the 1967 rebellions, state National Guards, under presidential orders, launched a thirty-two-hour crash program in riot-control training for Guardsmen. Additionally, the states were authorized to set up some 125 new Guard units. Most of the new units were to be military police units “specifically oriented to state riot control requirements.” Meanwhile, Guard units started holding special exercises with local and state police, designed to work out problems of communications and chain of command.

 

On April 23, 1968, the U.S. Army announced that it was adding five more brigades, or ten thousand troops, to the fifteen thousand men on regular antiriot duty. The troops are intensively trained in putting down civil disturbances. The new units were added because more than twenty-two thousand Army troops had to be sent into Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington to handle rebellions following the assassination of King. To coordinate the movement of these troops with local and state law enforcement agencies, riot control centers have been set up by the Pentagon for every area of the country. These are equipped with advanced communications gear and special wall maps of cities and towns.

 

To reduce reaction time in a potentially explosive situation, computers are being used to predict likely rebellion areas and suggest troop deployment patterns.

[…if they were hot on this issue of predicting where resistance… dissent… may arise forty-five years ago… imagine where we are today – we-the-people – we-the-people are in that warming water that has become very hot indeed… and we-frogs need to start jumping out of it… – P.S.]

…we have to look global to understand ‘power’s moves in any individual state… because indeed… the surplus populations exist… and we see they have plans for us… we who dissent… which calls for our elimination… but we also see… ‘power’s enormous need right now – and we can see ‘power’ doing this at a pace which is completely frightening – of degrading whole populations": degrading the spirits… the hopes… the heart… of whole populations so that they can be forced to do the work on which the entire system runs… There is no ‘happenstance’ about all the violence in Mexico and Syria and Iraq and across Africa. Rather… it’s by plan. And those plans require a global popular interruption… response… We need a plan… plain and simple. Which means we need a vision.

 

Most major cities also have detailed “emergency mobilization plans” which provide for virtually instantaneous sealing off of ghettos, arrest of militant leaders, and movement of armed troops to preselected areas. These plans alone run to several volumes. They allow for close cooperation and coordination among local, state, and federal agencies in quelling civil disturbance.

 

To many blacks, the logical next step in these preparations for repression was the setting up of concentration camps. And a rash of rumors claiming that exactly this was being done flashed through black America in 1967 and 1968. Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and other militants frequently argued that blacks were a surplus population in the United States…

[…we have to look global to understand ‘power’s moves in any individual state… because indeed… the surplus populations exist… and we see they have plans for us… we who dissent… which calls for our elimination… but we also see… ‘power’s enormous need right now – and we can see ‘power’ doing this at a pace which is completely frightening – of degrading whole populations": degrading the spirits… the hopes… the heart… of whole populations so that they can be forced to do the work on which the entire system runs… There is no ‘happenstance’ about all the violence in Mexico and Syria and Iraq and across Africa. Rather… it’s by plan. And those plans require a global popular interruption… response… We need a plan… plain and simple. Which means we need a vision. – P.S.]

“Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and other militants frequently argued that blacks were a surplus population in the United States which was pensioned off on welfare rolls.…” But I think they’ve devised a range of tactics for ridding themselves of we troublesome populations… and that the unifying theme of those tactics may be… ‘plausible deniability’… They don’t want it to be seen… what they're really doing…

 

…Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and other militants frequently argued that blacks were a surplus population in the United States which was pensioned off on welfare rolls. But the rebellions, said the militants, had prompted white America to make plans for a “final solution” to the race problem by permanently ridding itself of the troublesome blacks.

[…But I think they’ve devised a range of tactics for ridding themselves of we troublesome populations… and that the unifying theme of those tactics may be… ‘plausible deniability’… They don’t want it to be seen… what they're really doing…. – P.S.]

“Martin Luther King was moved, just six days before he was killed, to say: “I see a ghetto perhaps cordoned off into a concentration camp. I haven’t said there was a move afoot, just that it is a possibility. The more there are riots, the more repression will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing take-over, and eventually a Fascist society.”…” “Under Title II of the 1950 Internal Security (McCarran) Act six detention camps were set up. Construction began in 1952 and was completed in 1954. Title II gives the President power to proclaim an “internal security emergency” in the event of “any one of the following: (1) Invasion of the territory of the United States or its possessions, (2) Declaration of war by Congress, or (3) Insurrection within the United States in aid of a foreign enemy.”…” […and of course now that “protecting the economy” has been made a matter of ‘national security’… “aiding the enemy” could be defined to include pretty much all dissent… if they so choose… – P.S.]

 

…Martin Luther King was moved, just six days before he was killed, to say: “I see a ghetto perhaps cordoned off into a concentration camp. I haven’t said there was a move afoot, just that it is a possibility. The more there are riots, the more repression will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing take-over, and eventually a Fascist society.” [Look, May 28, 1968]

 

The white press at first ignored this growing fear and then sought to exorcise it by claiming that it was based on myth. The Washington Post, for instance, ran a long article in March 1968 which contended that “there is no evidence that a concentration camp system exists or is planned…” A Look magazine article in May of that year stated flatly: “A probing into every available official record and a running down of every current rumor yield no evidence either of physical preparations or of plans by the Federal Government for mass-level incarceration of Americans….”

 

But blacks recalled the forced evacuation of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans to “relocation camps” in 1943 and the confiscation of their property. If it happened once, why couldn’t it happen again?

 

To date, the most authoritative study of detention camps in the United States is a sixty-page booklet written by free-lance journalist Charles R. Allen. The booklet was published in 1966 by the Citizens Committee for Constitutional Liberties. Under Title II of the 1950 Internal Security (McCarran) Act six detention camps were set up. Construction began in 1952 and was completed in 1954. Title II gives the President power to proclaim an “internal security emergency” in the event of “any one of the following: (1) Invasion of the territory of the United States or its possessions, (2) Declaration of war by Congress, or (3) Insurrection within the United States in aid of a foreign enemy.”…

[…and of course now that “protecting the economy” has been made a matter of ‘national security’… “aiding the enemy” could be defined to include pretty much all dissent… if they so choose… – P.S.]

…In the event of such a proclamation by the President, the Attorney General is authorized to apprehend and detain “in such places of detention as may be provided by him… all persons as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in or probably will conspire with others to engage in acts of espionage and sabotage.”

 

…and let’s not forget what we learned from Nafeez Ahmed about the ‘Minerva Project’ (in the July 29, 2014 show…) which told all the academics engaged in social science research: “Get on it!… we need the rationale… the ‘legal justification…’” for arguing that folks who have done nothing but repeat the words of the Declaration of Independence, that: it is our right to abolish any state… that interferes with our right as a people (we’re not talking ‘individuals’ here…) to pursue our happiness (i.e., we need the rationale for how we can ‘plausibly’ categorize non-violent dissent as posing a threat to the Republic….) So… “how can we rationalize labeling these folks as ‘likely to engage in sabotage’?… Get on it, Social Scientists… what do we pay you for?…”

[…and let’s not forget what we learned from Nafeez Ahmed about the ‘Minerva Project’ (in the July 29, 2014 show…) which told all the academics engaged in social science research: “Get on it!… we need the rationale… the ‘legal justification…’” for arguing that folks who have done nothing but repeat the words of the Declaration of Independence, that: it is our right to abolish any state… that interferes with our right as a people (we’re not talking ‘individuals’ here…) to pursue our happiness (i.e., we need the rationale for how we can ‘plausibly’ categorize non-violent dissent as posing a threat to the Republic….) So… “how can we rationalize labeling these folks as ‘likely to engage in sabotage’?… Get on it, Social Scientists… what do we pay you for?…” – P.S.]

The McCarran Act was passed over President Truman’s veto. In his veto message, Truman warned: “It is not enough to say that this probably would not be done. The mere fact that it could be done shows clearly how the bill would open a Pandora’s box of opportunities for official condemnation of organizations and individuals for perfectly honest opinions… The basic error of these sections is that they move in the direction of suppressing opinion and belief… a long step toward totalitarianism.” Construction of the detention camps began at the height of the McCarthy hysteria which followed the Korean War. (Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, p. 201- 204)

 

[From Wikipedia we learn that “The McCarran Internal Security Act” – despite certain sections (not to do with the existence… and the authorization for use… of… the camps) having been amended or repealed – is still on the books… – P.S.]

Looking at the track record of ‘states’ – skewed towards the U.S. – in caring about the psychic and material health of ‘its’ people… its careful attention to keeping us informed of its activities… exposes as completely irrational the notion that societal redesign… done by we-the-people… that puts us in the driver’s seat… should somehow be seen as a scary thing. Are you serious? When I hear folks say that ending ‘rank’ and releasing the repressed creative energies of we-the-people globally so that we can determine our own cooperative global systems for reproducing our lives and establishing good fellowship… when I hear them speak fearfully that it could mean ‘something worse’… I’m reminded of battered wives… afraid to leave… or hope… minds so claimed by ‘power’s lies… that they convince themselves that to resist would be… not just futile… but catastrophic.

 

Looking at the track record of ‘states’ – skewed towards the U.S. – in caring about the psychic and material health of ‘its’ people… its careful attention to keeping us informed of its activities…

(…a broad look at a tiny cross-section of the recent history [Modern Dictatorship by Diana Spearman provide some of these highlights… – see “Palmers’ Chat” for the full excerpt…] of how ‘power’ treats the people in its most ‘privileged’ sectors… reveals: “Pangalos, in Greece, set up a military dictatorship in 1926…”; “Hitler [Germany], Mussolini [Italy], Pilsudski [Poland], King Alexander [Yugoslavia] and Kemal [Turkey] were all successful in the sense that they seized… power and… retained it… In Spain [Primo de Rivera], Lithuania [Valdemaras] and Greece [Pangalos], dictators [also] appeared…”; German chancellor Adolf Hitler establishes the Third Reich in 1933; attempted coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934; World War II… with its unimaginable slaughter and destruction – including atom bomb ‘tests’ at the expense of yet further hundreds of thousands… if not millions – leaves us speechless… and its aftermath, as Keith Lowe documents, no less so…; the McCarthy era commandeers the U.S…. during which the McCarran Act which authorizes the construction of concentration camps for U.S. citizens… and authorizes as well actually putting folks in them… in the event the president calls for it…; brutal repression of low-income communities in the U.S. never ceases…; the militarization of the police in 1968…; the surveillance state deepens the hold and scope of its control over the populace as revealed by the Church and Pike Committee in the 1970s [this was discussed in the Waking Up Radio show of August 18, 2013…]; planning apace for locking down cities and detaining and incarcerating those who dissent…; privatization of the vote-tabulation process…; ‘man-in-the-middle’ computer architecture installed in voting machines…; systematic stealing of the vote and disenfranchisement by many means…; media-capture massages the concerns of the populace…; Bush is selected by the Supreme Court to be U.S. president in 2000… after which comes 9-11 and the dramatic elimination of the meager ‘civil liberties’ ‘enjoyed’ by U.S. ‘citizens’… with the passage of the ‘Patriot’ Act; and in the Waking Up Radio show of November 17, 2013, we said:

(…today [November 13, 2013] I listened to an interview with the heroic Mark Klein… who I sure hope is being hosted royally at numerous speaking engagements across the country… his courage was never held up and celebrated as the model of heart which it clearly was… he’s the man who learned when he was working in an AT&T ‘Internet Room’ in San Francisco, that directly below him a secret room had been installed with a splitter… he exposed the fact that AT&T cooperatively funneled all of its data to the NSA. AT&T was never punished. He estimates that there are 15 – 20 such secret rooms across the country. He spoke out in 2007… six years later nothing has changed… except I’ve no doubt Mark Klein has been forced to pay a hefty price in health and peace of mind…. So those that can… those who have the luxury of a sweet spot in the Matrix… play-pretend they live in a ‘democracy’… and those that can’t… are punished…)

…Looking at this minute slice… of the full scope of ‘power’s devious devices… exposes as completely irrational the notion that societal redesign… done by we-the-people… that puts us in the driver’s seat… should somehow be seen as a scary thing. Are you serious? When I hear folks say that ending ‘rank’ and releasing the repressed creative energies of we-the-people globally so that we can determine our own cooperative global systems for reproducing our lives and establishing good fellowship… when I hear them speak fearfully that it could mean ‘something worse’… I’m reminded of battered wives… afraid to leave… or hope… minds so claimed by ‘power’s lies… that they convince themselves that to resist would be… not just futile… but catastrophic.

 

So… perhaps it might be helpful to frame this discussion of ‘leadership’ as being about… essentially… whether one’s concept of ‘leadership’ is derived from ‘division’ (most importantly… ‘division’ from our earth… and so division from one’s own authentic ‘self’…) or from ‘freedom’. There’s no doubt where the first goes: ‘repression’ repeated ad infinitum (as life will ever push to realize its inherent [earth-given] freedom….) The current U.S. state’s building momentum towards forcing us to accept an even more deeply-set regime of repression as the ‘new standard’ for our conditions of existence… clearly… is its ‘old’ one… only with more dangerous weapons… and with an earth depleted – meaning… that the stakes are higher than at any other time in human ‘class’-history.

 

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We need discussion of this: of how it is that the rigidity of hierarchical structuring leads to a circularity of thinking… under ‘class’: “It exists this way so it must exist this way… and the compromises imposed on our humanity – our disconnection from each other and the earth – are the necessary price we pay… to keep things going this way.” A discussion of the circular trap of Hierarchy is also a discussion of the new organizational forms with which we replace it. So what’s the opposite of ‘play your position’ if not ‘let your work – that which you’re here to do – become manifest in the world… be shared freely with your sisters and brothers’?

 

What causes ‘civil unrest’ once we get past the con of ‘division’?

 

“Failure of ‘the economy’ to provide for ‘its’ ‘citizens’…”

 

In my critique of the Henwood piece last week… in which I said he was misleading in his presentation of ‘the economy’… I realized later that I was misleading myself… in giving the notion credence when I said, referring to his attack on Barack for not ‘fixing’ ‘the economy’: “as if that mega-monster is moved at the behest… of a U.S. president…”

 

…I should rather have said: “as if a U.S. president could disgorge from his (or her) own body all the untold tons of ‘resource-treasure’ extracted from the earth to feed that monster… called ‘the system’… called ‘power’… called ‘class’…”

 

This relates to the current discussion… first: because reproducing ourselves… our lives… has been made to seem ‘too complicated’ for we commoners to attempt to do… second: because social arrangements redesigned by commoners with the earth in mind saves both… and third: broadly-dispersed popular decision-making disperses authority to those who prioritize supporting life… before abstract ideals that undergird the self-justification of global-state-statesmen… i.e., honesty can live again in human inter-relationships….

 

Repeatedly in recent weeks I’ve heard the belief expressed: both that we-the-people are not ‘smart enough’ to manage our own lives… and that we ‘aren’t interested’ in this. “Most people are not interested in being ‘leaders’…” I heard one woman say, who was hosting a conversation about W.E.B. Du Bois.

 

And also recently I heard a Prof… on the book-hawk circuit … opine sadly that ‘the people’ simply don’t understand the complexities of the system in which we’re enmeshed… and the host agreed, saying: “do we really want people who don’t even know who was president during WWI making decisions for the rest of us?”

 

And in no instance when these thoughts are expressed is there any hint that they are premised on the perpetuation of ‘the system’… the ‘system’ of ‘rank’.

 

In one discussion I heard… of something called ‘participatory budgeting’… in which ‘cities’ (a chameleon-like actor pushed on stage and made to speak ad hoc prae-thought… a fraudulent piece of theater…) ‘cities’ allow ‘citizens’ to ‘make’ some budget decisions. New York and Chicago have such a process… said the guest… but of course not for the ‘big’ decisions. Both host and guest agreed… for ‘big’ things – ‘capital expenditures’… multi-year sewer-replacements… and such like that – we must lean on ‘the experts’.

 

So we see how the rigidly circular trap of Hierarchy eliminates… prae-thought… notions based on freedom.

 

We need discussion of this: of how it is that the rigidity of hierarchical structuring leads to a circularity of thinking… under ‘class’: “It exists this way so it must exist this way… and the compromises imposed on our humanity – our disconnection from each other and the earth – are the necessary price we pay… to keep things going this way.”

 

A discussion of the circular trap of Hierarchy is also a discussion of the new organizational forms with which we replace it. So what’s the opposite of ‘play your position’ if not ‘let your work – that which you’re here to do – become manifest in the world… be shared freely with your sisters and brothers’? Now… this is what we’re told… all round – parents… media… schools – this is what we’re told ‘educational institutions’ are for…

(…or at least… that’s what we used to be told… today, ‘power’ feels so confident that we are rootless-bootless-no place to go-utterly dependent that they thumb there noses at us… and say… “we know change is hard… but if you want to live you’d best adjust your expectations and prepare to take that service job if we offer it… and no complaining either…” [I listened to some ‘economist’… I think he was… recently say just this…])

…but they lie… or rather they repeat the lies they were trained with… like robots on automatic… a button pushed… and all the propaganda is regurgitated.

 

And the world is so constructed as to ensure there is no alternative that any commoner could clap her eyes on…

 

…no alternative to dressing up our gifts – exchanging living for performance – in the fraudulent hope someone will buy them.

 

But what if we flipped it and said: “The loss of hierarchical structuring is the necessary price we pay to honor our humanity – to reestablish our connections with each other and the earth…”?

 

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We have a ‘system’ that subjects us to its scrutiny… and asks, “are you good enough to serve me?” What if we flipped it? How would we make ‘it’ work? (Although in truth there is no ‘it’… only freedom.) Bend ‘it’ to our – each individual’s – will? How would we make ‘it’ provide what we needed… to make each day a masterwork of freedom?… If we stop to consider the matter we’ll see that our diminishment is the point of ‘division’ – beyond its main purpose to contain and control us… – to distinguish who is ‘good’ from who ‘isn’t’… to sift out the obedient… – and that the ‘job’ of this ‘educational result’ (the obedient) is to construct and control ‘popular opinion’… the endorsement of which protects the ideology of ‘democracy’… which forms the warp and weft of ‘rule’. – “This is connected with a question which seems to have puzzled Socrates a great deal: that those who are not sufficiently educated, and thus not wise enough to know their deficiencies, are just those who are in the greatest need of education. Readiness to learn in itself proves the possession of wisdom, in fact all the wisdom claimed by Socrates for himself; for he who is ready to learn knows how little he knows.” – [I think the way out of this seeming dilemma of the ‘need – or not – for authority’… is to recognize, and to trust, the authority of the earth… its power to recapture mis-taught souls. The ‘force’ upon our minds of that which feeds us is profound… and authentic judgment rests… on being self-sufficient. – PS.]

 

How any diminishment of any among us in our own eyes… via the means “construction of popular opinion equals ‘democracy’” – that ideology – … leads… directly to our doom… as commoners globally… How ‘democracy’ is made a circular trap with the aid of this key con – diminishment – against which we’re made proof when we stand with our brothers and sisters… in speech and in action

We have a ‘system’ that subjects us to its scrutiny…

…and asks, “are you good enough to serve me?”

(and that question causes us much grief… much grief…)

“Look not left nor right but to…

…the orders that I give to you.

Be quick about it… be perfect… or be gone.”

Now that’s ‘the system’. We work for ‘it’.

 

What if we flipped it? How would we make ‘it’ work? Bend ‘it’ to our – each individual’s – will? How would we make ‘it’ provide what we needed… to make each day a masterwork of freedom?

 

If we stop to consider the matter we’ll see that our diminishment is the point of ‘division’ – beyond its main purpose to contain and control us… – to distinguish who is ‘good’ from who ‘isn’t’… to sift out the obedient… that ‘division’ is key to establish the need for some artificial… mythical belief in the efficacy of ‘hierarchical leadership’… and this ‘style’ of ‘leadership’ is co-signed by illusory notions of ‘excellence’ (perfection)… and that ‘excellence’ is determined by means of educational institutions… which exist to select ‘obedience’… – and that the ‘job’ of this ‘educational result’ (the obedient) is to construct and control ‘popular opinion’… the endorsement of which protects the ideology of ‘democracy’… which forms the warp and weft of ‘rule’.

 

And so this diminishment is made to justify everything… its every horror may be laid at its door: “are they poor?… well… it’s because they’re ‘uneducated’…” “do they tend to dissolution… do they drink… use drugs… disrespect their bodies?… well… what do you expect… they never learned better… we must work harder to ‘help’ them… by building the technological and surveillance infrastructure to ‘identify’ their ‘needs’… so we can drag them into the twenty-first century…”

I heard her say: “They don’t want to ‘lead’…”

But ‘Mother’ didn’t want to be a fearless evolutionary…

…till she was…

Things change… in our sense of ourselves…

…as we gain new information…

We are all brilliant – and probably all the more so to the degree we know how much we’ve yet to grow… as Socrates intimated [this is discussed on our page devoted to Karl Popper: “Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth”… from which we share this excerpt (from the Waking Up Radio show of October 6, 2013, found on the page, “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”)]:

“Socrates’ Dilemma… points to the illegitimacy of ‘rule’”

 

[No doubt the] Sir Richard-and-Ban-and-World-Bank-head-led initiative to sooth our concerns about global ‘inequality’… [will be framed as] “inequality in education”…)

(…and a big ‘shout-out and thank you’ to our brothers and sisters globally – from South Africa to Chile to Bahrain, Greece and China – who are fighting this dispossession… including the dispossession of our bodies…)

…removed from this seat of our health and well-being and happiness… the earth…

…and so we will be asking, with Karl Popper’s help… “leadership to what?” And I’ve posted a short piece on this page called “On Leadership and Self-Organization… On ‘Poor’ and ‘Rich’” [included in the October 27, 2013 show] which I hope you’ll read. I’m intending it to be a sort of ‘preface’ to our conversation with Karl Popper…. We will be discussing not just Popper’s insights on ‘authentic education’… and the fostering of ‘leadership’… but also whether, or to what degree, these insights bear on the possibilities for ‘authentic governance’… i.e. we will be challenging this seeming sacrosanct notion of ‘rule’….

 

Now this ties in to ‘Socrates’ Dilemma’:

 

“Socrates’ Dilemma… points to the illegitimacy of ‘rule’”

 

But this moral intellectualism of Socrates is a two-edged sword. It has its equalitarian and democratic aspect, which was later developed by Antithenes. But it has also an aspect which may give rise to strongly anti-democratic tendencies. Its stress upon the need for enlightenment, for education, might easily be misinterpreted as a demand for authoritarianism. This is connected with a question which seems to have puzzled Socrates a great deal: that those who are not sufficiently educated, and thus not wise enough to know their deficiencies, are just those who are in the greatest need of education. Readiness to learn in itself proves the possession of wisdom, in fact all the wisdom claimed by Socrates for himself; for he who is ready to learn knows how little he knows. The uneducated seems thus to be in need of any authority to wake him up, since he cannot be expected to be self-critical…. (from chapter 7, “The Principle of Leadership” of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato)

 

[I think the way out of this seeming dilemma of the ‘need – or not – for authority’… is to recognize, and to trust, the authority of the earth… its power to recapture mis-taught souls. The ‘force’ upon our minds of that which feeds us is profound… and authentic judgment rests… on being self-sufficient. – PS.]

(Why don’t they say it?… that claiming our work… our human energy… is the point of ‘the system’… and there is no ‘new system’ – some nicer… more humane way to exploit us – there is only freedom.) – “Getting ‘big’ is a process… this is what we all go through…” This is a lesson the earth teaches the earth-connected… What ‘power’ does… is arrest our natural earth-process of growth by affixing ‘class’-labels to us… A system that suppresses our natural urge to grow… to grow endlessly… by restricting what we are allowed to think… and keeping us worried about material survival… extracts from us a seeming ‘consent’… to support its self-justification… But once the false survival pressure and suppression of our ancestors’ thoughts that work to make us whole again… once that pressure and suppression is gone… oh the beauty and brilliance that is us will be as if a second sun is rising in the sky… as so it will be… as so it is…

 

So the way out… is for us to trust the authority of the earth… something the earth-connected appreciate by definition.

(It seems the earth-connected view the world more dynamically: a constant ‘growing’ or ‘unfolding’ in the midst of dense connections. Whereas those tightly held in ‘power’s grip perceive the world in categories that are fixed… fixed in the moment we are looking at them… to remain so for some period indefinite… categories which then determine the possibilities of those stuck in them. Now, we don’t start out like that, so how does this happen? I never met a two-year-old that didn’t take profound command of something. Even if it was a private something… he or she owned it… strode through it… surveyed its gathered realm… and viewed it fluidly… as belonging to a wider world in which we all partake… and of which we all are made. They sense and validate the infinite because they so lately lived in it… brought with them from amorphousness… the sense that anything can happen.)

A small example. Maybe ten years ago or so a Venezuelan documentary came out about one of the many initiatives of Hugo Chavez to build the confidence of the people: musical instruments were given to the children… I believe… of Caracas… and they were taught how to play them. One scene showed two children practicing… and one was further along in her claiming of the instrument. And when a sound from her friend’s instrument emerged discordant… they laughed and laughed. The sound was for them a joke… but never the person. It was understood… this is a process… this is what we all go through. That’s a lesson the earth teaches the earth-connected. But a ‘power’-allegiance would put the two in hierarchical rank and judge one to be the ‘lesser’ of the other… and the judgment tends to then become a label… from which others turn as from contagion.

 

What ‘power’ does is arrest our natural earth-process of growth by affixing (‘class’) labels to us. How is it that we on the Left don’t see… that as a key tactic of control (ranking… with the harnessing of our human energy being the point of it) – we must go after it fiercely? Even people who claim to want a ‘new system’… who say a lot of the same things I do… including that we are all-of-us brilliant… if they are allowed into media of any reach… guaranteed… their message leaves us feeling hopeless: rootless… bootless… nowhere to go.

 

Why don’t they say it?… that claiming our work… our human energy… is the point of ‘the system’… and there is no ‘new system’ – some nicer… more humane way to exploit us – there is only freedom.

 

We have a ‘system’… a few misguided folks who have… over the centuries… constructed a heartless machine that they keep going by misguiding… manipulating… and exploiting our human capacities… our energy…

 

…a system that suppresses our natural urge to grow… to grow endlessly… by restricting what we are allowed to think… and keeping us worried about material survival…

 

…and this perpetually-made… insecure… constructed mass of us… is then given false choices in the formal political arena and… by means of this device… the fraudulently-conceived result is trumpeted as our ‘consent’… or our ‘apathy’ and ‘stupidity’.

 

But once the false survival pressure and suppression of our ancestors’ thoughts that work to make us whole again… once that pressure and suppression is gone…Oh the beauty and brilliance that is us will be as if a second sun is rising in the sky…

 

…as so it will be…

 

…as so it is.

 

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* “WUR of November 23rd, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercials’ I’m planning:

 

“There’s a certain amount of trust that is required for us to take that leap into the unknown which is our future… the trust has to do with the fact of knowing that we are earth… and just as we trust that the earth will be there for us each morning when we get up… we have to trust the earth in our own bodies: that is wants to heal… that it wants to be whole… and that as soon as ‘power’ is off our back we can start to grow straight again… trust that. That’s real. That’s true…”

 

“We have a ‘system’… a few misguided folks who have… over the centuries… constructed a heartless machine that they keep going by misguiding… manipulating… and exploiting our human capacities… our energy – a system that suppresses our natural urge to grow… to grow endlessly… by restricting what we are allowed to think… and keeping us worried about material survival… – and this perpetually-made… insecure… constructed mass of us… is then given false choices in the formal political arena and… by means of this device… the fraudulently-conceived result is trumpeted as our ‘consent’… or our ‘apathy’ and ‘stupidity’. But once the false survival pressure and suppression of our ancestors’ thoughts that work to make us whole again… once that pressure and suppression is gone…Oh the beauty and brilliance that is us will be as if a second sun is rising in the sky… as so it will be… as so it is.”]

 

“Sisters and Brothers: “There’s fascists a’foot. There be fascists in the woods…” – the world reeks of Hidden Schemes and False Actors… infiltrating… trying to unseat what cannot be unseated: our understanding of the motive forces Behind Things… particularly: the sad need to feel ‘supreme’ that led abandoned children – the would-be ‘global-statesmen’ – to unleash disharmony and misery upon the world. It is a Fearless Youth Energy – willing… to face… to see… what an undue sense of guilt at their forced complicity turned their elders’ eyes from – a Fearless Youth Energy that we’re seeing today: manifesting the ancestors’ call… to correct millennia-long wrongs. They see… what’s happening… and heroes that they are… are stepping up to take that “longest stride of soul”… to a future that’s free. What’s needed is for us to globally plan… plan for building the certainty within the hearts of our brothers and sisters… that we don’t need the statesmen’s ‘management’ of us… which… to say the least… it is incredibly energy-inefficient (as Nikola Tesla told us… a hundred years ago…): to throw away the power and creative energy of the vast… vast… majority… energy that we want to share… cooperatively… guided by our self-created… freely-developing… individualities as they grow… given joyfully… without force – energy that cannot exist under terms of coercion… under compulsion – “…every effort under compulsion requires a sacrifice of life energy…) “How do we transition to freedom?” This key question is the point of all our discussions… all raise the hope that we will join in the birthing… of a new world… beyond class… beyond structurally imposed and enforced stagnation and immaturity for the vast majority… …‘immaturity’ because we are compelled to be dependent… compelled to self-limit… compelled to relinquish our gifts… …and this ‘social arrangement’ cannot continue if we are to honor our commitments to life… to each other… and to a healthy planet.”]

 

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[I’m compiling my son’s beats with WUR spoken word on this page: “My Son's Beats… WUR Spoken Word-Beats”

 

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Now those among us who – usually as youth… moved by a search for truth… particularly as we trust what our bodies tell us – probe this… dissonance… and who bit by bit peel back the layers of our containment (because on the face of it… it’s pretty obvious we commoners have no resources that would purchase for us a ‘say’ in the way the social world is made…) begin to discover ‘motive forces’… that are seldom spoken of in public. And then… we keep following the threads… and find each question opens up a door to more… and more… and more… But… what if… every human being was doing this? What then? What would happen to “the role of work in creating our satisfaction?”

 

November 18th, 2014… American Left!: Is it not time to be more proactive global actors… the kind with a vision… the kind with a plan… the kind that uncompromisingly stand with our sisters and brothers ‘General-Striking’ for a reclaimed ‘humanity’ for all? There’s a lot of youth… and older folks too… with the heart… and the certainty… to know… that we deserve to live in the full abundance of the earth… of our gifts… and of our good fellowship. So let us give thanks for those standing tall… in Mexico… and Hong Kong… facing hard-core totalitarianism. And in particular… let’s support the call from the people of Mexico… for a General Strike… on November 20, 2014.

 

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Earlier this week I listened to a radio interview with a man who’d written a book [The Automation of Everything is its title] on the transformation of ‘wage work’… ‘the economy’… and ‘society’ overall… as a result of more and more categories of ‘work’ being automated – and in particular of the automation of analytic tasks that engage and satisfy those who do them. He talked about what he called “the paradox of ‘work’” (of course what he’s really describing is “the paradox of ‘consent’”… or “the puzzle of ‘consent’”…) that people say they don’t like to have to go to work… “but when you look at their ‘fulfillment level’ they’re much more satisfied at work. They enjoy the engagement… the challenge. We underestimate the role of work in creating our satisfaction,” he said. The host suggested that the kind of ‘work’ makes a difference… that… for instance… it’s unlikely that people enjoy working in a slaughterhouse. And the guest replied, “people who work in a slaughterhouse may enjoy that work… and they certainly enjoy it more that unemployment. I don’t see freeing ourselves from work as ‘utopia’… I see it as the opposite of ‘utopia’.

 

Brothers and Sisters: we have been arguing in these conversations that the difficulty we face getting free is largely because we have no ‘opponent’… that wherever we look for cause or culprit… when wrestling with the problems around us… we ‘see’ only ‘us’… and other commoners like ‘us’… and the resentment that results gets directed towards ourselves… which exacerbates the existing divisions of the ‘class’-system. Now those among us who – usually as youth… moved by a search for truth… particularly as we trust what our bodies tell us – probe this… dissonance… and who bit by bit peel back the layers of our containment (because on the face of it… it’s pretty obvious we commoners have no resources that would purchase for us a ‘say’ in the way the social world is made…) begin to discover ‘motive forces’… that are seldom spoken of in public. And then… we keep following the threads… and find each question opens up a door to more… and more… and more…

 

But… what if… every human being was doing this? What then? What would happen to “the role of work in creating our satisfaction?”

 

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We’ve been arguing that the construction of class requires the construction… and maintenance… of ‘class’-legitimating ideologies… which is the construction of ‘consent’… What we do not seem to be seeing – hard to know when we have no means of publicly discussing these things – is that the construction of ‘class’ is the work of states… not ‘economic forces’ or ‘actors’ (‘capitalists’…) – and students: you may want to consider as a tactic to take up one used here in California to fight the imposition of so-called ‘success fees’– students gathered pledges from their fellows to never contribute to the alma mater as alums if the university refused to credit their issues…

 

We’ve been arguing that the construction of class requires the construction… and maintenance… of ‘class’-legitimating ideologies… which is the construction of ‘consent’.

 

What we do not seem to be seeing – hard to know when we have no means of publicly discussing these things – is that the construction of ‘class’ is the work of states… not ‘economic forces’ or ‘actors’ (‘capitalists’…)

 

…and that the construction of ‘class’ is also the construction of ‘nation’…

 

…that ‘hierarchy’ doesn’t begin and end at the borders of a nation…

 

…that ‘nations’ are also ‘classed’… as Hopkins and Wallerstein have shown us.

 

Once we start discussing the fact that… it is not ‘capitalists’ creating ‘opportunities’ for us… from which we select a way we will be ‘made-use-of’… that creates ‘class’… but rather it is… states that restrict our access to information… that creates ‘class’.

 

So… this pundit blowing about in his ‘full-flown-heartless’ robes… telling us that ‘happiness’ is being chosen off the shelf as toilet paper for the ass of state… hoping to propagate the nonsense that we will be happy (‘fulfilled’… ‘satisfied’…) to slaughter at ‘power’s behest… if it means we won’t be left sitting on the bench… unwanted… is doing his small bit of service to the state toward helping it restrict our access to information.

 

Who made any of us so?... betrayer and betrayed… who made it so our strings could be played… if not the state?

 

How does this factor in… to our shaping a vision?

 

For one it means we must insist on absolutely no restrictions on free access to information… and totally open discussion…

 

…that we must have means for broad public discussion of what we want…

 

…and why… we want it…

 

So… demands for free… open… Internet globally are… for us… foundational… and students who demand free university education globally bring founding energy to the churning-yearning-turning… turning to the new day that’s blooming all around us globally…

 

…and students: you may want to consider as a tactic to take up one used here in California to fight the imposition of so-called ‘success fees’– students gathered pledges from their fellows to never contribute to the alma mater as alums if the university refused to credit their issues…

 

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Because of the state’s suppression of our free access to information… and to the ancestors who opposed ‘class’… either broadly or in any of its myriad guises… each generation of honest observers under the regime of ‘class’ retraces the steps of the previous one – begin by assuming the problem is ‘education’… and generally conclude by saying that “in some ways” things are getting worse for us… for our unity… for our independence of thought… for the quality of our souls… – “But through the crimson illumination of war, I realized and, afterward by travel around the world, saw even more clearly that so-called democracy today was allowing the mass of people to have only limited voice in government; that democratic control of what are at present the most important functions of men: work and earning a living and distributing goods and services; that here we did not have democracy; we had oligarchy, and oligarchy based on monopoly and income; and this oligarchy was as determined to deny democracy in industry as it had once been determined to deny democracy in legislation and choice of officials.”…

 

I’m including some quotes to flesh out this discussion. W.E.B. Du Bois has been coming up for me recently… first because Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America calls on us to reexamine Du Bois’ thoughts on how we get past the morass of ‘class’… and second because I was incensed at some pundits misrepresenting him… taking his name in vain… citing him as authority – substituting immature fragments for the whole man – to justify their elitism.

 

Because of the state’s suppression of our free access to information… and to the ancestors who opposed ‘class’… either broadly or in any of its myriad guises… each generation of honest observers under the regime of ‘class’ retraces the steps of the previous one… begins by assuming the problem is insufficient or deficient ‘education’… and generally conclude by saying that “in some ways” things are getting worse for us… for our unity… for our independence of thought… for the quality of our souls…

 

…because the problem is the hidden hand of ‘power’… which has never before… with concerted global action – and ‘global’ it must be… as ‘power’ is global – has never before today been fully faced.

My basic theory had been that race prejudice was primarily a matter of ignorance on the part of the mass of men, giving the evil and anti-social a chance to work their way; that when the truth was properly presented, the monstrous wrong of race hate must melt and melt quickly before it. All human action to me in those days was conscious and rational. There was no twilight zone….

 

…On the other hand, I began to be deeply and disturbingly aware that with all the success of our agitation and propaganda… the barriers of race prejudice were certainly as strong in 1930 as in 1910 the world over, and in certain aspects, from certain points of view, even stronger.

 

Or, in other words, beyond my conception of ignorance and deliberate ill-will as causes of race prejudice, there must be other and stronger and more threatening forces, forming the founding stones of race antagonisms, which we had only begun to attack or perhaps in reality had not attacked at all. Moreover, the attack upon these hidden and partially concealed causes of race hate, must be led by Negroes in a program which was not merely negative in the sense of calling on white folk to desist from certain practices and give up certain beliefs; but direct in the sense that Negroes must proceed constructively in new and comprehensive plans of their own.

 

I think it was the Russian Revolution which first illuminated and made clear this change in my basic thought. It was not that I at any time conceived of Bolshevik Russia as ushering in any present millennium. I was painfully sensitive to all its failures, to all the difficulties which it faced; but the clear and basic thing which appeared to me in unquestioned brightness, was that in the year 1917 and then, after a struggle with the world and famine ten years later, one of the largest nations of the world made up its mind frankly to face a set of problems which no nation was at the time willing to face, and which many nations including our own are unwilling to face even to this day.

 

Those questions involved the problem of the poverty of the mass of men in an age when an abundance of goods and technical efficiency of work seemed able to provide a sufficiency for all men, so that the mass of men could be fed and clothed and sheltered, live in health and have their intellectual faculties trained. Russia was trying to accomplish this by eventually putting into the hands of those people who do the world’s work the power to guide and rule the state for the best welfare of the masses. It made the assumption, long disputed, that out of the downtrodden mass of people, ability and character, sufficient to do this task effectively, could and would be found. I believed this dictum passionately. It was, in fact the foundation stone of my fight for black folk; it explained me.

 

I had been brought up with the democratic idea that this general welfare was the object of democratic action in the state, of allowing the governed a voice in government. But through the crimson illumination of war, I realized and, afterward by travel around the world, saw even more clearly that so-called democracy today was allowing the mass of people to have only limited voice in government; that democratic control of what are at present the most important functions of men: work and earning a living and distributing goods and services; that here we did not have democracy; we had oligarchy, and oligarchy based on monopoly and income; and this oligarchy was as determined to deny democracy in industry as it had once been determined to deny democracy in legislation and choice of officials. (W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 1940)

 

“Gradually it dawned upon me with increasing clarity just what the essential change in the world has been since the first World War and depression; and how the tactics of those who live for the widest development of men must change accordingly. It is not simply a matter of change in ideals, but even more of a decisive change in the methods by which ideals are to be approximated. As I now look back, I see in the crusade waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1910 to 1930, one of the finest efforts of liberalism to achieve human emancipation; and much was accomplished. But the essential difficulty with the liberalism of the twentieth century was not to realize the fundamental change brought about by the world-wide organization of work and trade and commerce.” […i.e. ‘power’ is a global actor… – P.S.]

 

…what frightens me very much is what Citizens United has done to the politics of this country and the ability of billionaires like the Koch brothers and others to put unprecedented sums of money into elections. And it frightens me very much, because I fear that we may be on the verge of becoming an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control not just the economy, but the political life of this country. And that’s just something we’re going to have to wrestle with. (Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent senator from Vermont, speaking on Democracy Now! on November 4, 2014)

[So much for that… in any case never real… ‘democracy in legislation’…

 

…and in the ‘economic’ realm… we’re back to ‘square one’… as if Townsend… and Kropotkin… and Du Bois… never existed… – P.S.]

I really believe that poverty in this country is a function of our unwillingness to do justice to many parts of our community. And I really do believe that the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. I think, you know, we have this arrogance. We think that when we make a mistake, we don’t ever have to apologize, we don’t actually have to rethink how we’ve behaved; we can just throw some money or throw some policy out there and move forward. I don’t believe that gets you closer to deconstructing poverty. (Bryan Stevenson, “founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a group based in Alabama that represents some of this country’s most marginalized people – the poor and the wrongfully convicted,” speaking on Democracy Now! on November 20, 2014)

 

Gradually it dawned upon me with increasing clarity just what the essential change in the world has been since the first World War and depression; and how the tactics of those who live for the widest development of men must change accordingly. It is not simply a matter of change in ideals, but even more of a decisive change in the methods by which ideals are to be approximated. As I now look back, I see in the crusade waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1910 to 1930, one of the finest efforts of liberalism to achieve human emancipation; and much was accomplished. But the essential difficulty with the liberalism of the twentieth century was not to realize the fundamental change brought about by the world-wide organization of work and trade and commerce. (W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 1940) […i.e. ‘power’ is a global actor… – P.S.]

…‘the state’ has devised a range of repressive means… from harassment… to infiltration… to microwave weaponry… to suppress dissent. The state touts them… and we have tended to accept them… as being “less than lethal”… blowing past the fact that dissent – and it is for dissuading dissent that such devices are ultimately made – that dissent should not be messed with… and that dissent in the face of such repression is heroic. It speaks to the fact that we-the-global-people need to be discussing and developing our own – opposite – way of seeing… that prioritize individual and collective freedom… and determining how to establish it in the world… as the seat of our society… our ‘intercourse’ (to use an old construction…) with each other…

 

Ten years later… in the wake of the most profligate blood-letting in human history… Du Bois… as were all with any ‘heart’ at all… was determined to help bring about an end to ‘war’.

My trip to the Soviet Union made it impossible for me to get to the Congress in Mexico City, but I watched with interest other peace conferences: in Cuba in August; in Australia in April 1950; the delegations to the Parliaments of the world, projected by the Defenders of Peace in Paris in February 1950. I joined a group to welcome persons selected to come here, including the Dean of Canterbury, and the great painter, Picasso. They were refused visas. A Mid-Century Conference for Peace was called by the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives in May 1950, in which I was asked to conduct a panel; but a previous engagement kept me away. I was asked to attend the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Paris Defenders of Peace in Prague in August 1951, and accepted. This meeting was to call a Second World Congress and make a new plea for disarmament. (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1968)

Brothers and Sisters… if we could ‘conference’ and ‘delegate’ ourselves into solving the core ‘problems’ of class: ‘poverty’ and ‘war’ (they are foundational – what truth-teller will say that?…) trust… our ancestors… who were ‘heavy-weights of honesty’ (in public life)… would have done it – a breed we don’t see around us today… who speak the truth – or as far into it as they can see at any moment – unflinchingly. And if we don’t measure to their standard… this is not our fault… not just because ‘academia’ no longer supports such honesty: as ‘money’ – i.e. the global-state statesmen who control where it goes… what gets funded… and what doesn’t… who have many ways to bring down ‘independent actors’ – as ‘money… i.e. ‘the system’… weeds out likely candidates for independent thought before they have the chance to challenge it…

 

…but… even more gut-wrenching… we have been stymied by a ‘system’ (and when we say ‘system’… we have to begin discussing the fact that that means by definition ‘totalitarian’… when we think about it… when we probe that notion… we see this…) that focuses itself singlemindedly on continuously expanding its means for killing and disabling – i.e. physically controlling – its ‘citizens’…

(…‘the state’ has devised a range of repressive means… from harassment… to infiltration… to microwave weaponry… to suppress dissent. The state touts them… and we have tended to accept them… as being “less than lethal”… blowing past the fact that dissent – and it is for dissuading dissent that such devices are ultimately made – that dissent should not be messed with… and that dissent in the face of such repression is heroic. It speaks to the fact that we-the-global-people need to be discussing and developing our own – opposite – way of seeing… that prioritize individual and collective freedom… and determining how to establish it in the world… as the seat of our society… our ‘intercourse’ (to use an old construction…) with each other…)

…and such tactics… such repressive means… got the better of us… until now… when the Internet… tips the balance… to us… if we seize that advantage… with a whole heart.

‘Peace’ – so goes ‘the state’s ideology of ‘governance’… the state’s construction of the terms for our existence – ‘aids foreign governments’… as it ‘compromises’ the ‘readiness’… of the U.S. state for war… …now… this is a logic we cannot break out of… if we restrict our action to individual state boxes. Again… we have yet to confront the truth-telling of Goring: that states can… and will… always create ‘external threats’ – in fact collude together to create ‘external threats’ – to exercise this ‘logic’.… It’s time for us to stop treading water… and use the Internet’s power – which we created and serve as substance of – for ourselves… to further all of us.

 

But before this meeting, we had succeeded in forming in the United States an organization to work for peace. This was the Peace Information Center. There were about 60 Americans who attended the World Conference of the Defenders of Peace in Paris in 1950. We were all tremendously impressed and discussed many times the question as to what we could do when we returned to America. We did nothing for nearly a year, because in the state of hysteria and war-mongering which we found in the United States, it was not at all clear as to what could be done legally.

 

[A meeting was convened at the home of O. John Rogge.] I went to the meeting and found that the 30 or 40 persons attending had already in previous meetings been exploring methods of organizing for peace in the United States. The first idea seemed to have been a federation of the various peace movements in the United States already in existence. That had fallen through. Then a committee to welcome the prominent advocates of peace who proposed to visit the United States proved useless when they were refused visas. We appointed a committee to explore possibilities. (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1968)

…checked by ‘the state’ at every turn… when will we begin discussing the degree to which our thought process has been contained and impaired by the ideology of ‘democracy’?… and accept as accurate the evidence before our eyes… and what our bodies tell us… about how ‘unsafe’… and ‘unfree’… we truly are.

The first direct public attack on the Peace Information Center came in a broadside from the United States Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, released July 12 (New York Times, July 13, 1950):

 

“I am sure that the American people will not be fooled by the so-called ‘world peace appeal’ or ‘Stockholm resolution’ now being circulated in this country for signatures. It should be recognized for what it is – a propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union….” (p. 358)

 

…Finally, on February 8, 1951, we were notified that the Grand Jury in Washington had indicted the Peace Information Center and its officers for “failure to register as agent of a foreign principal.” (p. 364 – 5)

‘Peace’ – so goes ‘the state’s ideology of ‘governance’… the state’s construction of the terms for our existence – ‘aids foreign governments’… as it ‘compromises’ the ‘readiness’… of the U.S. state for war…

 

…now… this is a logic we cannot break out of… if we restrict our action to individual state boxes.

 

Again… we have yet to confront the truth-telling of Goring: that states can… and will… always create ‘external threats’ – in fact collude together to create ‘external threats’ – to exercise this ‘logic’.

 

It’s time for us to stop treading water… and use the Internet’s power – which we created and serve as substance of – for ourselves… to further all of us.

 

…

 

‘Power’ never did… throughout the long… hard… history of ‘class’… never did like to hear the truth spoken – that’s the point of truth-telling today… we have to get past their threats.

 

All the lessons that the universe gives us… is for our gaining our freedom.

 

I know that now.

 

–––

 

[Continuing with our reading of Chapter 18 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”… – P.S.]

–––

 

“In a peculiar way the Soviets and the UPA seemed to be working in tandem to achieve their common goal. Maria Jozefowska and her family, for example, were forced out of their home village of Czerwonogrod when the UPA burned it down in July 1945. Immediately after the attack, the Soviet authorities laid on a special train to transport them out of Ukraine to Jaroslaw in Polish Galicia, almost as if the opportunity were too good to miss.” – […almost as if they knew in advance of it… we have many contemporary examples of such hidden collusion (and that ‘statesmen’ plot and play out their schemes behind scenes cannot be denied.) It clearly is a set-piece of this Theater of the Macabre and Hate-Besotted that is ‘class’… that is ‘power’… that is ‘rule’ – a drunken dream of ‘supremacy’… to further all of us.… Mussolini said that a hierarchy must culminate in a pinpoint… but what’s equally true… is that it cannot exist without populations that are ‘permanently’ (or at least that is ‘power’s wish…) degraded… that have no hope of ‘education’… of looking far beyond a narrow menial existence… no hope of seeing their creative spark catch fire… to add their luminance to the ever-expanding… because self-generating… growth of the human spirit… – P.S.]

 

Between 1944 and 1946 some 782,582 Poles were removed from Soviet Ukraine and resettled in Poland. A further 231,152 were expelled from Belarus, and 169,244 from Lithuania – giving a total of almost 1.2 million. Many of these people were harassed into leaving by the authorities. But many were also encouraged to leave of their own accord in order to escape the continuing ethnic violence which raged throughout 1945 and even into 1946. In a peculiar way the Soviets and the UPA seemed to be working in tandem to achieve their common goal. Maria Jozefowska and her family, for example, were forced out of their home village of Czerwonogrod when the UPA burned it down in July 1945. Immediately after the attack, the Soviet authorities laid on a special train to transport them out of Ukraine to Jaroslaw in Polish Galicia, almost as if the opportunity were too good to miss.

[…almost as if they knew in advance of it… we have many contemporary examples of such hidden collusion (and that ‘statesmen’ plot and play out their schemes behind scenes cannot be denied.) It clearly is a set-piece of this Theater of the Macabre and Hate-Besotted that is ‘class’… that is ‘power’… that is ‘rule’ – a drunken dream of ‘supremacy’: Russia calls others ‘fascist’ while they seed and grow and plant in foreign lands their lapdog play-pretend-bought-‘totalitarians’… to dispirit the local population…; Nigeria pretends it is not holding hands under the table with the phony ‘fundamentalists’ that terrorize ‘its’ ‘people’…; ‘Cold War’ collusion between the U.S. and the Soviets… producing rhetoric to pacify their respective populaces…; ‘ISIS’… attempting to forever conquer the freedom-loving folk of Iraq and Syria… is behind-scenes supported by the global-state-statesmen…; and the Mexican state… likewise hides its support of local drug lords… who do the ‘critical work’ of dispossession and subjection of the earth-connected. Mussolini said that a hierarchy must culminate in a pinpoint… but what’s equally true… is that it cannot exist without populations that are ‘permanently’ (or at least that is ‘power’s wish…) degraded… that have no hope of ‘education’… of looking far beyond a narrow menial existence… no hope of seeing their creative spark catch fire… to add their luminance to the ever-expanding… because self-generating… growth of the human spirit… – P.S.]

“Atrocities were carried out on innocent civilians, and even people who did not consider themselves Ukranian at all. The Lemkos, for example, were an ethnic group belonging to the Beskidy ranges of the Carpathian Mountains who had no historical interest in Ukraine or any other kind of nationalism, and wanted only to keep their own lands intact. Yet they were targeted and deported along with other Ukrainian speakers. Attempts by local leaders to explain the difference between Ukrainians and Lemkos fell on deaf ears.… The following day, Polish officers began to speak openly of ‘the complete extermination of the remnants of the Ukrainian population in the southeastern border region of Poland’. The Polish administration immediately launched another sweep of the region to root out all the remaining Ukrainian speakers.”

 

With the blessing of the Soviets, the Poles replied in kind by ‘repatriating’ over 482,000 Ukrainians, mostly from Galicia in the south-east of the country. The massacre at Zawadka Morochowska was part of this process, and shows how brutally it was carried out. Once again, the official actions of the Polish government were accompanied by unofficial actions by nationalist groups and members of the underground Armia Krajowa (‘Home Army’). Atrocities were carried out on innocent civilians, and even people who did not consider themselves Ukranian at all. The Lemkos, for example, were an ethnic group belonging to the Beskidy ranges of the Carpathian Mountains who had no historical interest in Ukraine or any other kind of nationalism, and wanted only to keep their own lands intact. Yet they were targeted and deported along with other Ukrainian speakers. Attempts by local leaders to explain the difference between Ukrainians and Lemkos fell on deaf ears.

 

Unsurprisingly, some Ukrainian and Lemkos turned to the UPA for protection against deportation. The UPA in Polish Galicia was not nearly so indiscriminately brutal as it was across the border in Ukraine, but was still not above murder, torture and the mutilation of its enemies. One former Polish soldier from this time, Henryk Jan Mielcarek, writes passionately about fellow soldiers who were beaten to death by UPA partisans, had their eyes and tongues cut out, or were tied to trees and left to die. But, given that nobody else was willing to help them, many Ukrainians saw no alternative to joining such partisan groups, or at least to providing them with support. This increasing popularity of the UPA in Galicia only inflamed the situation: it gave the army and the authorities even more justification for their policy of expelling these communities.

 

The Polish ‘repatriation’ campaign in 1945 – 6, brutal as it was, ended up being fairly successful. It did, however, encounter a major problem: towards the end of 1945 some of those Ukrainians who had already left Poland voluntarily started to come back. Many of these people had discovered that life in Ukraine was far worse than it was in the areas they had left, even factoring in Polish harassment. Not only was Ukraine much less well developed than south-east Poland, but the way it had repeatedly changed hands during the war had left it desolate. To make things even worse, the Soviets were not allowing many Polish Ukrainians to settle in the very country they were supposed to be ‘returning’ to: in order to prevent the OUN / UPA problem escalating, more than 75 per cent of Polish Ukrainians were settled in other parts of the USSR. As a consequence, thousands of Ukrainians returned to Poland in 1945 and 1946 to warn their fellow villagers not to go. This goes part of the way towards explaining why so many Ukrainians resisted deportation even in the face of increasingly violent racist attacks against them.

 

At the end of 1946 time finally ran out for the Polish authorities who wished to expel Ukrainian speakers from the country in their entirety. To bring the repatriations to an end, the Soviets closed the border between Ukraine and Poland. This did not suit the Polish authorities at all, since they estimated that there were still some 74,000 Ukrainians in the country who had evaded repatriation. In fact the numbers were much higher – about 200,000 in total. The Polish government petitioned the Soviets to allow the process to continue a little while longer, but to no avail.

 

Given the impossibility of expelling any more Ukrainians, it is conceivable that the matter might have ended there. Perhaps if the terrorist activities of the UPA had stopped, the Polish government would have felt confident enough to leave the remaining Ukrainians and Lemkos alone. Plans to continue the displacements on an internal basis, which already existed at the beginning of 1947, might have been dropped, and centuries of Ukrainian culture in Galicia might have been allowed to remain. Perhaps.

 

Such speculation is moot, however, because tensions between the Poles and their Ukrainian-speaking minorities did not relax – indeed they escalated. The tipping point came on 28 March 1947, when the Polish Deputy Minister of Defence, General Karol Swierczewski, was assassinated by the UPA. […Another set-piece… ‘power’ endlessly recycles the same devices… – P.S.] This killing proved to be a disaster for Poland’s Ukrainians , and was used as justification for a whole range of repressive measures against them. The following day, Polish officers began to speak openly of ‘the complete extermination of the remnants of the Ukrainian population in the southeastern border region of Poland’. The Polish administration immediately launched another sweep of the region to root out all the remaining Ukrainian speakers.

 

The operation was to be called Akcja Wisla – Operation Vistula. Its objectives were not only to destroy the UPA in Poland, but to bring about what its architects called, rather chillingly, a ‘final solution’ to the Ukrainian problem.

 

Forced Assimilation

 

“What made this particular displacement different from all the others was its purpose: the Polish authorities did not merely want to eject this ethnic group, but to compel it to give up all claims to a separate nationality. They were to be forced to change the way they spoke, the way they dressed, the way they worshipped and the way they were educated. The authorities would no longer allow them to be Ukrainians or Lemkos – ‘Because they wanted us all to become Poles.’ The whole process was deeply distressing, as interviews with Ukrainian-speaking Poles in recent times clearly show… For Anna… the most distressing event was the expulsion itself, and especially the behaviour of their Polish neighbours. Far from supporting or helping them, local Poles seemed only too keen to be rid of them, and looted their homes and property enthusiastically even before they had left….” [Do we see where ‘power’ is going?… that it’s a freight-train bearing down on the remaining intact cultures… that they will not stop until they have achieved their objective: the total global dispossession of every scrap of our humanity? They want no possible harbor to exist… none housed in any people. “Is there still good fellowship in the bosom of Syrians? Bedouins? Uygurs? Mexican villagers… the indigenous and earth-connected of Africa… and all lands? Can we feel the scope of the potential loss?… and so the urgency of the present moment?… that this train must be stopped… and is only stopped by all of us… together… reclaiming our humanity… – P.S.]

 

Operation Vistula began at the end of April 1947 and continued through to the late summer. Its intention was not only to ‘destroy the UPA bands’ but to work with the State Office of Repatriation to conduct ‘an evacuation of all persons of Ukrainian nationality from the region to the northwestern territories, resettling them there with a dispersion as sparse as possible.’ Historians who claim that the only purpose of the operation was to remove support for the UPA are ignoring these clear statements, issued by the Office of State Security itself, declaring ethnic cleansing of the country as an overt, and separate, objective.

 

The operation was intended to root out all the remaining Ukrainian speakers in the country to the last man, woman and child, and was to include even mixed Polish-Ukrainian families. These people were to be given a few hours to pack their things, and then taken to transit hubs to be registered. From here they were to be transported to diverse locations throughout the areas in the west and north that had once been German, but which were now part of Polish territory. In theory, families were to be transported together, but in practice all deportees were given a number and were displaced along with those who registered at the same time. In this way, family members who registered separately were often sent to towns and villages miles apart unless they could convince (or bribe) officials to let them stay together. Families were also supposed to be allowed to take clothes and valuables with them, and even a certain amount of livestock, in order to sustain themselves in their new homes. In reality they were rarely given enough time to pack properly, and were often forced to abandon important items at home to be looted by their Polish neighbours. Many also complain of being robbed by unscrupulous guards or gangs of local people during their journey.

 

There was nothing especially unique about the rounding up of entire villages and their displacement to another part of the continent – the war had made this practice commonplace, and by 1947 the specific displacement of Ukrainians had already been going on for more than two years. Nor was the scale of it unique – indeed, it was a relatively minor event compared to the continent-wide expulsion of Germans that I shall describe in the next chapter. What made this particular displacement different from all the others was its purpose: the Polish authorities did not merely want to eject this ethnic group, but to compel it to give up all claims to a separate nationality. They were to be forced to change the way they spoke, the way they dressed, the way they worshipped and the way they were educated. The authorities would no longer allow them to be Ukrainians or Lemkos – ‘Because they wanted us all to become Poles.’

 

The whole process was deeply distressing, as interviews with Ukrainian-speaking Poles in recent times clearly show. For Anna Klimasz and Rozalia Najduch, Lemkos who were deported from their village of Bednarka in Galicia, the most distressing event was the expulsion itself, and especially the behaviour of their Polish neighbours. Far from supporting or helping them, local Poles seemed only too keen to be rid of them, and looted their homes and property enthusiastically even before they had left….

[Do we see where ‘power’ is going?… that it’s a freight-train bearing down on the remaining intact cultures… that they will not stop until they have achieved their objective: the total global dispossession of every scrap of our humanity? They want no possible harbor to exist… none housed in any people. “Is there still good fellowship in the bosom of Syrians? Bedouins? Uygurs? Mexican villagers… the indigenous and earth-connected of Africa… and all lands?”

 

Can we feel the scope of the potential loss?… and so the urgency of the present moment?… that this train must be stopped… and is only stopped by all of us… together… reclaiming our humanity… – P.S.]

…Fellow villagers who refused to allow looters into their homes were beaten, while others had to stand by and watch while their houses were ransacked before their eyes. Some even had things stolen from the carts they were loading up to take with them, with the words, ‘Don’t take this, don’t take that. You won’t need this any longer…’

–––

* “WUR of November 30th, 2014… “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)

 

[Please check out the audio for the next ‘non-coercion commercials’ I’m planning:

 

“…and I have to say… it has occurred to me more than once… that their fantasy… these Plato’s Tribesmen… is to replace those gods on Mount Olympus… with themselves: the roar of their drones overhead… that are to inspire fear and dread…”

 

“…all we need to regenerate hopeful energy… is a vision… a view… of a free future… how can we move on as a species if the vast majority are not allowed to develop their gifts?… not allowed… to think…”

 

–––

 

…suggesting… that ‘power’ is already writing its ‘history’ of the Occupy Movement… with which to con… future students… a ‘history’ in which there is no infiltration… no disinformation… no provocation… and definitely… no microwave weaponry… …i.e. no ‘power’… …which means ‘power’ is being provided (as per its general practice…) an Academic Shield…

 

Brothers and Sisters… Till I started down this path I had no idea to what degree thinking is a radical act. When I see the photos of the young Occupiers of Hong Kong… sitting with their books… sparks almost visibly… flares of thought… emanating from their minds… I want to cry for joy… for their fierce loyalty to truth itself.

 

Here’s truth… it may be hard… but facing it leads to our freedom:

 

November 25th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: ‘Power’ is global… ‘class’ is totalitarian. What does this tell us about an effective vision?

 

This week (or rather… early this week… as I write these words…) I’ve been hearing the word ‘vision’… applied to the notion of a different future – which is, in fact, the theme for our November 30th show – used repeatedly over the airwaves… in ways that forced me to accept… that we have no common concept… no common understanding yet… of a people’s definition of it. Here are the contexts – which we’ll use to concretize our discussion – for its use: an ‘Occupy’ postmortem; an analysis of the Ferguson grand jury decision; and a discussion of Hawaiian sovereignty. The first instance was the most troubling…

 

…frightening in fact…

 

…frightening both because (if we may credit their – host and guest – honesty…)

 

…both because of their… seeming… determined obtuseness… and because the book the guest was hawking was published (if I heard this right) by UC-Berkeley… meaning… that the book is sanctioned by ‘power’…

 

…suggesting… that ‘power’ is already writing its ‘history’ of the Occupy Movement…

 

…with which to con… future students…

 

…a ‘history’ in which there is no infiltration… no disinformation… no provocation… and definitely… no microwave weaponry…

 

…i.e. no ‘power’…

 

…which means ‘power’ is being provided (as per its general practice…) an Academic Shield…

…what it feels like is happening… is… ‘power’ rushing to increase urban tensions that both ‘occupy’… and reduce… urban populaces… by attrition (accelerated negative health impacts… including increased stress and violence… and dispersal…) i.e., that we are being set up for conflict: that the police and the people are being set up to mutually perceive each other as ‘the enemy’… and that… minimally… we-the-people must counter ‘power’s intended effect of making ‘the police’ the target of our activism by using the language ‘the state’ instead of ‘the police’ – acknowledging that they have bosses… and are being pushed internally… It worries me that I very rarely hear said that the main issue is work… that the lever of the wage does in fact convert us into something very like a machine… that says what it is paid to say… does what it is paid to do… and that that means a totalitarian future. If we were to talk about it we would see that when you restrict the ability of people to be free agents… to think and act independently… it means being set up for authoritarian rule… which we are in fact living in… without discussing it…

 

(…have you checked out the December, 2014 Mother Jones article on “The Making of the Warrior Cop” by Shane Bauer? It raises questions we touched on during our August 31, 2014 Waking Up Radio show… in which we discussed Nelson Peery’s book, The Future Is Up To Us:

 

“We see what’s happening. Are they going to try a fascist dictatorship? Of course they are. Are they already trying it in certain areas? Of course they are. They can no longer isolate a tiny section of the American population and impose such a dictatorship against them – not politically or racially or any other way. They have created a monster. They have created a section of the population that has to consume, but has no way of being part of the productive process anymore….” (Nelson Peery, The Future Is Up To Us: A Revolutionary Talking Politics With the American People (2001), p. 133 – 4)

 

I would put it differently… because ‘power’ is global… because ‘class’ is totalitarian… and because ‘power’s fundamental raison d’etre is not endless accumulation for its own sake… but for creating the world it wants. ‘Power’ is utilitarian as regards that end… it either sees a use for us… or it doesn’t. And I agree with Peery that ‘power’ has reached the limits of its ability to ‘pacify’ enough people (with incomes) to maintain its legitimacy… to sustain broad, popular acceptance of subject-status. And I agree with him that it can no longer restrict its totalitarian tactics to a few targeted groups… that increasingly… the entire populace has become a target…

 

…what it feels like is happening… is… ‘power’ rushing to increase urban tensions that both ‘occupy’… and reduce… urban populaces… by attrition (accelerated negative health impacts… including increased stress and violence… and dispersal…)

 

…i.e., that we are being set up for conflict: that the police and the people are being set up to mutually perceive each other as ‘the enemy’… and that… minimally… we-the-people must counter ‘power’s intended effect of making ‘the police’ the target of our activism by using the language ‘the state’ instead of ‘the police’ – acknowledging that they have bosses… and are being pushed internally…

 

It worries me that I very rarely hear said that the main issue is work… that the lever of the wage does in fact convert us into something very like a machine… that says what it is paid to say… does what it is paid to do… and that that means a totalitarian future. If we were to talk about it we would see that when you restrict the ability of people to be free agents… to think and act independently… it means being set up for authoritarian rule… which we are in fact living in… without discussing it….

 

So we are being set up for conflict… and while we're told via the media that that conflict is white against black… what we know in our own experience is that there is actually a coming together… I mean Barack couldn't have been elected otherwise… around wanting to be free from surveillance… free from this constant assault on our civil liberties… free from the oppressiveness of always having to struggle to survive… but the conflict that we are being set up for… is the police and the people perceiving each other as mutual enemies… which means that minimally we-the-people have to begin countering these moves on 'power's part… to divide us… So… instead of saying 'the police'… when referring to their acts of brutality against us… that we say 'the state' instead… and recognize that the police are paid actors… and using the language 'the state' acknowledges that the police are being pushed internally.

 

And what is clear… is the need for broad popular organizing for an authentically different future… a future that unites us in our moving toward it… and in its achievement…)

The peoples in the past – under ‘class’ – who tried to escape ‘the system’… using the mechanism of nation-state ‘independence’… have nonetheless today been assigned their places in the ‘global order’… by the global-state statesmen… ‘Power’ is global. ‘Class’ is totalitarian. Facing these facts gives us our vision: a global society that is non-‘class’.

 

My concerns about our lack of clarity about the word ‘vision’… when applied to the critique of our current social arrangement… is part of a general concern about the lack of clear definitions among those of us who want to end ‘power’s privilege. This concern centers on that sentence we began with: ‘Power’ is global… ‘class’ is totalitarian.

 

What does this tell us about an effective vision? I began answering this question on the page: Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…, in which I wrote a version of what follows:

If we agree that the ‘citizen’ – ‘barbarian’ divide… is at the root of all ‘class’ ideologies… then we can see that ‘class’ itself provides the fundamental raison d’etre for the state … and that… therefore… necessarily… there’s built-in inequality… and… if we truly want to be free… then… necessarily… we cannot accept enslavement… or ‘barbarian’-status… for any of us….

In the ‘Occupy’ postmortem… the pundit argued that ‘vision’ “got in the way of ‘planning’…” because Occupiers “put their vision and principles before practical organizing…” – a use of ‘vision’ that does not imply deep social critique (analysis which… necessarily… must precede action…) but rather personal idiosyncrasy. He criticized the Occupiers on a number of fronts… saying they “didn’t learn the lessons of previous generations”… without specifying… concretely… what they should have done… and concluded (outrageously… from my perspective…) that the encampments were breaking up (due to internal conflicts) even before the police dismantled them…. Again… no mention of agents… or disinformation… or other forms of clandestine assaults on them from the state… – the whole of which meant their endurance was truly heroic.

 

The Occupiers were overcoming atomization (most likely not as a result of their analysis of ‘power’… but in a more ‘instinctive’ way… as Marcuse puts it…) they were learning how to play the instrument of ‘collective action’… experiencing the high of communalism… and they were studying and discussing and figuring out ‘the system’ they were stuck in – they were growing their individual gifts… their individualities… they were developing their ‘thought’… getting ‘bigger’.

 

The problem wasn’t them… the problem was… and is… folks like this pundit: planted closet-dissuaders who present inaccurate analysis… which keeps us from working on the true problems… which in the case of the Occupiers are: agent provocation… hidden military techniques… ‘power’s control of public opinion via the media… and inaccurate analysis of ‘the system’… i.e. the inability of those who want to move beyond ‘power’ – to dismantle ‘power’s privilege – to develop an effective strategy and vision. [More on my assessment of the Occupy Movement can be found in “Beginning Again”.]

 

And the other two uses likewise dissolve in a clear analysis.

 

In a de-brief of the Ferguson grand jury decision, I heard these words: “we have to vote into office people with a different vision for the state….” This is but saying “we need nicer daddies…” when what we really need is our own leadership capacities released.

 

In the discussion of the sovereignty of Hawaii, I heard this: when asked, “What is your vision of sovereignty?”… the guest answered, “our path is different because we were already a nation-state…” making a case for Hawaiian ‘specialness’.

 

Now… we all have a case for ‘specialness’… the point is… not in our vision of the future… because that’s straightforward and clear – and saying it’s a ‘global non-class society’… does not deny in any way the rich cultural diversity and traditions that we bring to the design of our communities… in any way… but it’s about working together to get the broad social context that we need to grow our individualities… individually and culturally.

 

The peoples in the past – under ‘class’ – who tried to escape ‘the system’… using the mechanism of nation-state ‘independence’… have nonetheless today been assigned their places in the ‘global order’… by the global-state statesmen.

 

‘Power’ is global. ‘Class’ is totalitarian. Facing these facts gives us our vision: a global society that is non-‘class’.

 

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…developing a common global vision of… and activism for… freedom… may be less of a problem than we suppose precisely because – I mean we’ve never done this… we’re going to be talking more about what ‘global action’ means in upcoming shows… but it’s a game-changer… it changes the rhythm of our activism… it’s a new beat… it’s a global beat… it means we reverberate back and forth with each other… it’s ‘call-and-response’… in real time… using instantaneous communication means – it’s a different world from what has ever existed before – it’s just getting past that initial challenge of doing something that we’ve never done before.

 

And how does a common concept of ‘vision’ make a difference when… as we’re seeing in Hong Kong… the state can play its trump-card of physical repression… can employ clandestine military action… and… because it owns the media (as we saw in Egypt… and of course here in the U.S. with the Occupy Movement…) can mobilize the ‘internalized state’ in our sleeping brothers and sisters?

 

(Now this has always been our primary challenge… that ‘internalized state’ within all of us… because we are turned over to the system and ‘educated’ by the ‘masters’. It’s very hard to challenge the state… which we’ll be seeing as we read excerpts from The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois.)

 

This may be less of a problem than we suppose. The Internet… and increasing global joblessness… has cut a broad swath of resistance… and multiplies impact fast – in short… the pump has been primed… which means that… we simply must begin… each one of us who hears this… to share these words with our brothers and sisters: that our goal – not in some distant generation… but right now – is a global society that is classless.

 

(It also may be less of a problem precisely because – I mean we’ve never done this… we’re going to be talking more about what ‘global action’ means in upcoming shows… but it’s a game-changer… it changes the rhythm of our activism… it’s a new beat… it’s a global beat… it means we reverberate back and forth with each other… it’s ‘call-and-response’… in real time… using instantaneous communication means – it’s a different world from what has ever existed before – it’s just getting past that initial challenge of doing something that we’ve never done before.)

 

“The response of Negroes in general was slow. At first many Negroes were puzzled. They did not understand the indictment and assumed that I had let myself be drawn into some treasonable acts or movements in retaliation for continued discrimination in this land, which I had long fought. They understood this and forgave it, but thought my action ill-advised… The intelligentsia, the “Talented Tenth,” the successful business and professional men, were not, for the most part, outspoken in my defense… as a group this class was either silent or actually antagonistic…”

 

Compare the state of our awareness when Du Bois wrote these words… some 55 years ago… with where we are today… consider that while ‘power’s grip on our necks has advanced (with the technology…) so has our understanding of it… as has our means to respond effectively.

In this indictment of the Peace Information Center, I received a severe jolt, because in fact I found myself being punished before I was tried. In the first place, the Department of Justice allowed the impression to spread that my colleagues and I had in some way betrayed our country. Although the charge was not treason, it was widely understood and said that the Peace Information Center had been discovered to be an agent of the Soviet Union…

 

The white commercial press treated our case either with silence or violent condemnation. The New York Herald-Tribune had this editorial, February 11:

 

“The Du Bois outfit was set up to promote a tricky appeal of Soviet origin, poisonous in its surface innocence, which made it appear that a signature against the use of atomic weapons would forthwith insure world peace. It was, in short an attempt to disarm America…”

 

The response of Negroes in general was slow. At first many Negroes were puzzled. They did not understand the indictment and assumed that I had let myself be drawn into some treasonable acts or movements in retaliation for continued discrimination in this land, which I had long fought. They understood this and forgave it, but thought my action ill-advised…. The Chicago Defender said:

 

“Dr. Du Bois has earned many honors and it is a supreme tragedy that he should have become embroiled in activities that have been exposed as subversive in the twilight of his years.”…The intelligentsia, the “Talented Tenth,” the successful business and professional men, were not, for the most part, outspoken in my defense… as a group this class was either silent or actually antagonistic…

 

I have belonged to a Negro graduate fraternity for 45 years – indeed helped its first formation… In my own New York chapter I was bitterly criticized….

 

I served the NAACP for 28 years in all…. The president of the Board of Directors said frankly to Shirley Graham [who Du Bois married in February, 1950] that undoubtedly the Peace Information Center was supported by funds from the Soviet Union…. At a meeting, March 12, of the Board of Directors, it was urged that the Board take a position on the indictment… However, the secretary, Walter White, reported that he had talked with Peyton Ford, assistant to the Attorney-General in Washington, and was told that there was definite evidence of guilt in the hands of the Department of Justice and that the four associates of Dr. Du Bois could not be prosecuted without prosecuting Dr. Du Bois….

 

“Why is it, with the earth’s abundance and our mastery of natural forces, and miraculous technique; with our commerce belting the earth; and goods and services pouring from our stores, factories, ships and warehouses; why is it that nevertheless most human beings are starving to death… There is no way in the world for us to preserve the ideals of a democratic America, save by drastically curbing the present power of concentrated wealth; by assuming ownership of some natural resources, by administering many of our key industries, and by socializing our services for public welfare… Either in some way or to some degree we socialize our economy, restore the New Deal, and inaugurate the welfare state, or we descend into military fascism which will kill all dreams of democracy; of the abolition of poverty, disease and ignorance; or of peace instead of war…” [So we see… that… while the ‘solution’ advanced on the Left… for the problem, “the commodification of life…” – i.e. to make the state ‘socialist’ – by its most progressive voices hasn’t advanced from this clear articulation – while ‘power’s physical-repression-means have grown exponentially… – those means can never out-strip the power of the synthony (for our resistance) expressed in our absorption of Popper, Alice Miller, Miklos, and Bentham… Hopkins and Wallerstein… Martin Bernal and Tesla. With their help… we are granting ourselves the room we need… psychically and materially… to grow as a species… – P.S.]

 

There followed an appeal to the people of the United States, by lecture trips undertaken by myself and my wife, Shirley Graham. We wished to meet the blackout in the press by explaining our case; and to collect funds for our legal expenses….

 

We started out in the Spring, in June. Our plan was for Shirley to speak first and explain the case…. Then came the collection… Then I spoke:

 

“…Why is it, with the earth’s abundance and our mastery of natural forces, and miraculous technique; with our commerce belting the earth; and goods and services pouring from our stores, factories, ships and warehouses; why is it that nevertheless most human beings are starving to death, dying of preventable diseases, and too ignorant to know what is the matter, while a small minority are so rich that they cannot spend their income?

 

“That is the problem which faces the world… There is no way in the world for us to preserve the ideals of a democratic America, save by drastically curbing the present power of concentrated wealth; by assuming ownership of some natural resources, by administering many of our key industries, and by socializing our services for public welfare… Either in some way or to some degree we socialize our economy, restore the New Deal, and inaugurate the welfare state, or we descend into military fascism which will kill all dreams of democracy; of the abolition of poverty, disease and ignorance; or of peace instead of war…”

 

[Could there be a clearer assessment of the dilemma… of the situation… of the choice before us? And yet here we sit… sixty-five years later… and no further along in the vision of the future… and how to get there.

 

So we see… that… while the ‘solution’ advanced on the Left… for the problem, “the commodification of life…” – i.e. to make the state ‘socialist’ – by its most progressive voices hasn’t advanced from this clear articulation – while ‘power’s physical-repression-means have grown exponentially… – those means can never out-strip the power of the synthony (for our resistance) expressed in our absorption of Popper, Alice Miller, Miklos, and Bentham… Hopkins and Wallerstein… Martin Bernal and Tesla. With their help… we are granting ourselves the room we need… psychically and materially… to grow as a species… – P.S.]

 

“Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug passive satisfaction. History had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry – the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force. It was never possible to know where the scholar Du Bois ended and the organizer Du Bois began. The two qualities in him were a single, unified force.… In conclusion let me say that Dr. Du Bois’ greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice. Today we are still challenged to be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind, freedom and human dignity for his spirit…. Let us be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda…”

 

I have faced during my life many unpleasant experiences; the growl of a mob; the personal threat of murder; the scowling distaste of an audience. But nothing has so cowed me as that day, November 8, 1951, when I took my seat in a Washington courtroom as an indicted criminal. I was not a criminal. I had broken no law, consciously or unwittingly. Yet I sat with four other American citizens of unblemished character, never before accused even of misdemeanor… accused of a felony and liable to be sentenced before leaving this court to five years of imprisonment, a fine of $10,000 and loss of my civil and political rights as a citizen, representing five generations of Americans. (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1968)

At this point, Dr. Du Bois was 83. He lived to be 95. At his 100th birthday celebration, Dr. Martin Luther King said, in this excerpt from his speech:

Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug passive satisfaction. History had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry – the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force. It was never possible to know where the scholar Du Bois ended and the organizer Du Bois began. The two qualities in him were a single, unified force….

 

In conclusion let me say that Dr. Du Bois’ greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice. Today we are still challenged to be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind, freedom and human dignity for his spirit…. Let us be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda…. (Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking at Carnegie Hall in New York City, February 23,1968.)

“With the acceptance of the jury there could be but one conclusion, and that was that the government thought it had absolute proof to convict us… [But as it did not…] Why, then had the Department of Justice been so arrogant, determined, and certain?… The real object was to prevent American citizens of any sort from daring to think or talk against the determination of big business to reduce Asia to colonial subserviency to American industry; to reweld the chains on Africa; to consolidate United States control of the Caribbean and South America; and above all to crush socialism in the Soviet Union and China. That was the object of this case.…” – [We have to add the coda that… ‘big business’ is licensed by the state to privatize the resources of the globe… that the global-state-statesmen are the ones pulling the strings ultimately… and that they fill both functions – corporate privatizers and shadow-global-policy-makers – they go back and forth: they are the hidden shadow-state that never has to be accountable… – P.S.]

 

Dr. Du Bois describes the trial:

It was not even fully admitted until the third week of the trial that the government did not allege that the Soviet Union was the “foreign principal” accused in the indictment. It was never alleged that we had no right to advocate peace. It was only the question: were we “agents” of a foreign principal? Yet and despite all this, the public was deliberately given to understand by spokesmen of government and by the press that we were accused of lying, spying, and treason in the pay of the Soviet Union. As one of the attendants said in the ante-room of the court, scowling at us: “If the damned Communists don’t like this country, why don’t they go back to Russia?’

 

The chief dependence of the prosecution was on O. John Rogge. Rogge the witness was a caricature of Rogge the crusader for peace and reform. In place of the erect self-confident if not arrogant leader, came a worn man, whose clothes hung loosely on him, and who in a courtroom where he had conducted many cases, had difficulty locating me in the defendant’s chair. I voluntarily stood up to help him out. (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1968)

[…these guys… these agents… pride themselves on their acting ability – I hope W.E.B. is employing subtlety… that he thinks he need not beat us blunt about the head… pound us with the obvious: that he and his fellow honest organizers got to see first-hand what are perhaps ‘power’s oldest first-line tactics against potential threats: infiltration with its agents; and manipulation of popular opinion by dropping stories in the media. Because ‘power’ never did… and never will… play ‘fair’ – it cannot be honest – and will ever refuse to accept less than what it wants (it may fall back from a hard-line stance… and seem to temper it… while in truth it but waits… for more propitious circumstances…): i.e., it “makes its own luck”… it creates – or tries to – its desired outcome… and… i.e. again: we cannot ‘bargain’ with it. We need our own vision and our own plan for realizing it. – P.S.]

[The judge instructed the jury to disregard Mr. Rogge’s testimony as not coming from an ‘expert witness’…]:

 

Although we did not at the time realize it, and still watched narrowly for trumped-up testimony, it was right here that we won our case. The prosecution had rested its whole case on Rogge’s testimony that we were representing the Soviet Union through the Defenders of Peace organization in Paris. They had naturally not an iota of real proof of this, but they planned to depend on public opinion.

 

[This illustrates perfectly how ‘democracy’ functions in reality… as opposed to… in ideology… – P.S.]

 

[The judge dismissed the case…]:

 

We left Washington as quickly as possible. I was, frankly, bewildered. Of all the results of this fantastic and utterly unfair indictment, this was quite the last which I had awaited…. With the acceptance of the jury there could be but one conclusion, and that was that the government thought it had absolute proof to convict us… [But as it did not…] Why, then had the Department of Justice been so arrogant, determined, and certain?… The real object was to prevent American citizens of any sort from daring to think or talk against the determination of big business to reduce Asia to colonial subserviency to American industry; to reweld the chains on Africa; to consolidate United States control of the Caribbean and South America; and above all to crush socialism in the Soviet Union and China. That was the object of this case.

 

[We have to add the coda that… ‘big business’ is licensed by the state to privatize the resources of the globe… that the global-state-statesmen are the ones pulling the strings ultimately… and that they fill both functions – corporate privatizers and shadow-global-policy-makers – they go back and forth: they are the hidden shadow-state that never has to be accountable… – P.S.]

 

“…most Americans of education and stature did not say a word or move a hand. This is the most astonishing and frightening result of this trial. We five are free but America is not. The absence of moral courage and intellectual integrity which our prosecution revealed still stands to frighten our own nation and the better world. It is clear still today, that freedom of speech and of thinking can be attacked in the United States without the intellectual and moral leaders of this land raising a hand or saying a word in protest or defense, except in the case of the Saving Few. Their ranks did not include the heads of the great universities, the leaders of religion, or most of the great names in science. Than this fateful silence there is on earth no greater menace to present civilization.… I find, curiously enough… that my experience in this fantastic accusation and criminal process is tending to free me from that racial provincialism which I always recognized but which I was sure would eventually land me in an upper realm of cultural unity, led by “My People.… It was a bitter experience and I bowed before the storm. But I did not break…. I found new friends and lived in a wider world than ever before – a world with no color line. I lost my leadership of my race… The colored children ceased to hear my name.”

 

This object every intelligent American knew. Our leading thinkers and educators were perfectly aware of this assault on the basis of the democratic process in America… Despite this, most Americans of education and stature did not say a word or move a hand. This is the most astonishing and frightening result of this trial. We five are free but America is not. The absence of moral courage and intellectual integrity which our prosecution revealed still stands to frighten our own nation and the better world. It is clear still today, that freedom of speech and of thinking can be attacked in the United States without the intellectual and moral leaders of this land raising a hand or saying a word in protest or defense, except in the case of the Saving Few. Their ranks did not include the heads of the great universities, the leaders of religion, or most of the great names in science. Than this fateful silence there is on earth no greater menace to present civilization.…

 

I find, curiously enough then, that my experience in this fantastic accusation and criminal process is tending to free me from that racial provincialism which I always recognized but which I was sure would eventually land me in an upper realm of cultural unity, led by “My People.” I have discovered that a large and powerful portion of the educated and well-to-do Negroes are refusing to forge forward in social leadership of anyone, even their own people, but are eager to fight social medicine for sick whites or even sicker Negroes…

 

As I have related, there came the indictment and trial and after long struggle the acquittal. But that was not the end. The publication of my story of this persecution in my book In Battle for Peace; the collaboration of Shirley Graham; my open thanks to the Communists of the world for their help in my defense; and my clear stand in favor of the Soviet Union intensified the enmity of those who rule. My defense of the Rosenbergs in speech and writing and my denunciation of the hounding and imprisonment of the Communists as unjust and barbarous did the same.

 

All this made my enemies and the Federal government take a determined stand to insure my destruction. The secret police swarmed in my neighborhood asking about my visitors… My manuscripts and those of Shirley Graham were refused publication by reputable commercial publishers. My mail was tampered with or withheld. Negro newspapers were warned not to carry my writings nor mention prominently my name. Colleges ceased to invite my lectures and Negro colleges no longer asked for my lectures or my presence at Commencement exercises…. A whispering campaign continually intimated that some hidden treason or bribery could be laid at my door if the government had not been lenient. The central office of the NAACP refused to let local branches invite me or sponsor my lectures. I was refused the right to speak on the University of California campus, because of the NAACP protest.…

 

It was a bitter experience and I bowed before the storm. But I did not break…. I found new friends and lived in a wider world than ever before – a world with no color line. I lost my leadership of my race… The colored children ceased to hear my name. (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1968)

…But later… another thought came to the surface: that this too needs to be flipped… if we are to see this social arrangement called ‘class’… and so our dilemma… more accurately. For what could be more silent and unheard than these Plato’s Tribesmen?… condemned to Duplicity and Silence… who even more so than we have had their authentic voices stolen? And if ‘hearing’ theirs breaks the Spell… let’s hear them as we free ourselves: They fear Imperfection… they fear to fail their Fathers… they fear Disorder… and are taught that we-the-people are the source of all these ‘threats’: failure to realize Plato’s vision… imperfection… disorder.… The global-state-statesmen are racists in a Platonic sense… i.e., they desire to make them… ‘races’… If we can – ourselves – get past these (internalized… trained-in-us…) mental blockages… sourced from Plato’s Tribesmen: fear of failing the Fathers… fear of Imperfection… fear of Disorder… and so move unencumbered-conscious – and choose to see the opposite of ‘power’: a classless global society… …and use that definition for “a people’s vision”… …necessarily as well we’d see that means ‘no state’.

 

Has indeed our understanding of ‘the state’ and our subjection to it advanced… as I believe? Are we less likely to find that ‘internalized state’… trained into each one of us… mobilized by the so-called ‘masters’? This is a question I hope we start discussing.

 

From one of the on-air discussions I listened to of the Ferguson grand jury decision came this comment: “Martin Luther King said that ‘violence is the language of the unheard.’ The question is, ‘can they hear us now?’”

 

My first reaction to it was “is this the level of the discourse… still?” (meaning… “let’s discuss why the state celebrates ‘our’ violence: because it gives them cover… and so they plant their agents to ensure it happens.”) But later… another thought came to the surface: that this too needs to be flipped… if we are to see this social arrangement called ‘class’… and so our dilemma… more accurately. For what could be more silent and unheard than these Plato’s Tribesmen?… condemned to Duplicity and Silence… who even more so than we have had their authentic voices stolen? And if ‘hearing’ theirs breaks the Spell… let’s hear them as we free ourselves: They fear Imperfection… they fear to fail their Fathers… they fear Disorder… and are taught that we-the-people are the source of all these ‘threats’: failure to realize Plato’s vision… imperfection… disorder. And while they may claim in their official voices – as we’ll see when we look at Kissinger briefly – that they understand there is no ‘permanent’ fix… they are dishonest… for they long for it… and their aspiration is sufficient to cause havoc. They have ever longed for ‘the final solution’. They are racist… but not in the way we’ve been taught to attribute to ourselves. Is a ‘god’ ‘racist’ when ‘he’ allocates to ‘his’ people different things? The global-state-statesmen are racists in a Platonic sense… i.e., they desire to make them… ‘races’… using the ‘raw material’ they are ‘given’.

 

If we can – ourselves – get past these (internalized… trained-in-us…) mental blockages… sourced from Plato’s Tribesmen: fear of failing the Fathers… fear of Imperfection… fear of Disorder… and so move unencumbered-conscious – and choose to see the opposite of ‘power’: a classless global society…

 

…and use that definition for “a people’s vision”…

 

…necessarily as well we’d see that means ‘no state’.

 

So… our Doctors – Martin and Du Bois – could not fully comprehend this vision… because fear of ‘Disorder’ – that key fear of the Fathers – still hobbled their conception (or perhaps… it’s just as Tesla intimated… that we needed the Internet to see this…) and so they still held to notions of ‘representatives’ for us… being charged to try to wrestle with ‘power’ and establish greater ‘fairness’.

 

And yet… do we see that they show us the ‘necessary trajectory’ for each one of us when the earth takes our hand… we… taught by ‘power’ to stick to our ‘boxes’… the ones they made for us… to keep us small? They became threats… when they reached beyond them… listening… firstly… to the earth… but then also seeing ‘power’s reaction as we grow….

 

We’ve said that states make ‘class’ (think: ‘differential education’…)

 

Now… we… none of us… like ‘class’…. Do we think states can start to make its ‘opposite’? No one suggests this. All we hear is that states can chip away at it… try to create greater ‘fairness’. We’re fed this with the con that… “it’s Nature that divides us… it’s Nature that makes us ‘unequal’…” – not them. But none of us believe it. I like the straightforward way Zora puts things:

You cannot arouse any enthusiasm in me to join in a protest for the boss to provide me with a better hoe to chop his cotton with. Why must I chop cotton at all? Why fix a class of cotton-choppers? I will join in no protests for the boss to put a little more stuffing in my bunk. I don’t even want the bunk. I want the boss’s bed. It seems to me that the people who are enunciating these principles are so saturated with European ideas that they miss the whole point of America. The people who founded this country, and the immigrants who came later, came here to get away from class distinctions and to keep their unborn children from knowing about them. I am all for the idea of free vertical movement, nothing horizontal…

 

This is not to say… that the darker races are visiting angels… I just think it would be a good thing for the Anglo-Saxon to get the idea out of his head that everybody else owes him something just for being blonde. I am forced to the conclusion that two-thirds of them do hold that view. The idea of human slavery is so deeply ground in that the pink-toes can’t get it out of their system. It has just been decided to move the slave quarters farther away from the house. ( Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942)

(We are not supposed to link fates with our Sisters and Brothers and claim the globe. ‘Power’ sees this as impinging on its role… and so when we do it bears its fangs and goes for our throats – would-be-‘gods’ resent we-plebs reaching beyond our so-called ‘station’… in thought no less than action.)

 

We all want to be done with it… with ‘class’… and so the question is: “Why are we afraid to demand what we want?”

 

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[Continuing with our reading of Chapter 18 of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… “The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland”… – P.S.]

 

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“[For those] suspected of partisan involvement… the stress of displacement now became a nightmare. They were sent to prisons and internment camps, the most infamous of which was Jaworzno, an ex-Nazi prison camp that had been taken over by the Polish authorities. Here they were beaten, robbed and subjected to a regimen of poor food, poor sanitation and poor treatment… prisoners were tortured by sadistic prison guards, who hung them from pipes, pierced them with pins, force-fed them various liquids and beat them with metal bars, electric cables, rifle butts and a variety of other implements.…” – [During our reading of Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account… we made the point that the ‘world-system’… or the ‘world economy’… was set up to achieve the aims of Auschwitz effortlessly… i.e. by ‘economic’ means: that lever of the wage… and of credit. Current illustrations are too numerous to name… but I think we see the point by thinking, ‘austerity’… and ‘foreclosure crisis’. Urban communities in the U.S. are being ‘dispersed’ by leading us down the path of ‘debt’… – P.S.]

 

[Operation Vistula… in which the Polish government uprooted Ukrainian-speakers in the Southeastern border region and transported them “to diverse locations throughout the areas in the west and north that had once been German, but which were now part of Polish territory.” This was a catastrophe for the Ukrainian-speakers made all the more bitter by the betrayal of their neighbors… who lusted after their stuff. This was the most stressful part for some… – P.S.]

For others, the most stressful time was the period of uncertainty that came after they had left their villages and were forced to wait in shabby transit camps to see where they would be displaced to. This period could last anything from a few days to several weeks. Olga Zdanowicz, a Ukrainian from Graziowa in Galicia, had to sleep in the open at the transit camp in Trzcianiec for three weeks. The villagers from Bednarka were forced to stay in a camp at Zagorzany for two weeks, also without shelter, and with little food to eat but that which they had brought with them. Rozalia Najduch was reduced to stealing fodder from local peasants to feed her animals. Anna Szewczyk and Mikolaj Sokacz remember sleeping underneath their carts alongside the livestock as the only way of escaping the elements. During this time all deportees were questioned by Polish officials, the implication being that their very ethnicity made them potential UPA terrorists.

 

It was at the transit camps that those who were most suspected of partisan involvement were arrested. For these people the stress of displacement now became a nightmare. They were sent to prisons and internment camps, the most infamous of which was Jaworzno, an ex-Nazi prison camp that had been taken over by the Polish authorities. Here they were beaten, robbed and subjected to a regimen of poor food, poor sanitation and poor treatment. One of the several commandants of the camp was the infamous Salomon Morel, who was transferred here after his time in charge of the camp for Germans at Zgoda. As at Zgoda, prisoners were tortured by sadistic prison guards, who hung them from pipes, pierced them with pins, force-fed them various liquids and beat them with metal bars, electric cables, rifle butts and a variety of other implements. In the Ukrainian sub-camp at Jaworzno 161 prisoners died as a direct result of malnutrition, five from typhus, and two women committed suicide.

 

For the majority of Ukrainians, meanwhile, the next stage was their journey to their new homes. Friends and acquaintances were split up and loaded onto trains along with their livestock – four families and their animals to each boxcar – and transported to the former German provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia on the opposite side of Poland. While the journey was nothing like as terrifying as the ordeal awaiting those who were sent to Jaworzno, there was a brief moment of panic when the trains passed within a few kilometres of Auschwitz. The journey could take anything up to two weeks, during which time the deportees became filthy and covered in lice.

 

For all the uncertainty and discomfort of the journey it was sometimes not nearly so unpleasant as their arrival in a new and unknown land. The way the system was supposed to work was as follows: each family would be given a destination, and would be expected to report to the local State Office of Repatriation when they got there. They would be allocated a property to live in, or sometimes they would be awarded this property in a lottery. Having been abandoned by their former German owners, these properties were supposed to be furnished – the idea was that the furniture that the displaced Ukrainians and Lemkos had had to leave behind would be replaced by furniture in their new homes. In reality, however, anything of use or value had long since been looted, or confiscated by corrupt officials. By 1947 all the best properties had been taken by displaced Poles, leaving only derelict buildings, ransacked apartments or broken-down farms with desperately poor soil. Families who arrived here often abandoned the places they had been allocated and roamed the countryside looking for something better.

 

Their welcome was usually far from warm. Since the purpose of removing these people from their communities was to disperse them, families from the same village were not supposed to be housed in the same area. Indeed, often only nuclear families were allowed to stay together – extended families were to be split up in the same way as the whole community was.…

[During our reading of Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account – one of the early shows – we made the point that the ‘world-system’… or the ‘world economy’… was set up to achieve the aims of Auschwitz effortlessly… i.e. by ‘economic’ means: that lever of the wage… and of credit. Current illustrations are too numerous to name… but I think we see the point by thinking, ‘austerity’… and ‘foreclosure crisis’. Urban communities in the U.S. are being ‘dispersed’ by leading us down the path of ‘debt’… – P.S.]

“The one experience that united all these people – and indeed all of the millions of others who were displaced from their lands after the Second World War – was a desire to return ‘home’. This was, however, the one act that was forbidden above all others. Those who tried to return to their villages in Galicia found themselves faced with angry militiamen……” – [‘Thought’ itself is forbidden by the ‘class’ system… i.e., by ‘states’… ‘states’ require submission… and subjection of the human thought-process to Authority… means the end of it. We can only claim our full earth-inheritance… by growing beyond the Obedience demanded of us by states… which means… by growing beyond the falsely conceived ‘need’… for ‘the state’. Until then… we will be endlessly jerked around… violated… disrespected… limited… damaged… our human possibilities mutilated… by them.… – P.S.]

 

In most cases, therefore, families found themselves completely isolated, without any of the community they had grown up with to support them. Worse than this, they regularly found themselves surrounded by hostile people who actively despised them. Many of the Poles who had recently been deported from Volhynia and other parts of Soviet Ukraine had also been relocated in these areas….

[Can we help but see… that Bentham’s Panopticonic set of control techniques… a prison-design applied to a global society… is… both macro and micro applied… the model by which we are forced to live our lives?… – P.S.]

Having survived the savage civil war in their own homelands, the last people these Poles wanted as neighbours were more Ukrainians. Some of those deported in Operation Vistula speak of being beaten by Poles in the towns where they were rehoused, others were merely shunned – almost all found it difficult to find work or make friends.

 

Anti-Ukrainian prejudice was everywhere. Mikolaj Sokacz remembers being arrested and beaten by militiamen who were convinced that he was a member of the UPA. He had no choice but to take it in his stride for, as he explains, ‘Lemkos were beaten a lot.’ Those who were sent to Jaworzno remember having stones thrown at them and being spat at by local people, because they were supposedly the ones responsible for the assassination of General Swierczewski. Teodor Szewczyk remembers overhearing a Polish smallholder he worked for claiming, ‘I won’t pay those f…ing Ukrainians! They can work for food.’ And so on.

 

Where Ukrainians and Lemkos did come across others like them, opportunities for mutual support, or even basic socializing, were rare. Official paranoia about the UPA had led to rules banning Ukrainian speakers from gathering in groups of more than a few people. Anyone caught speaking Ukrainian to someone else was automatically suspected of conspiracy. The Orthodox and Uniate churches were also banned, obliging Ukrainians to worship in a foreign tongue, in Catholic churches, or not at all.

 

Since the point of Operation Vistula was to assimilate Ukrainians into the Polish Communist state, children were in some ways the main focus of the authorities’ attentions. All children were forced to speak Polish at school, and Ukrainian literature was banned. Boys and girls caught speaking Ukrainian were reprimanded and sometimes punished. They were often given compulsory classes in Catholicism, as well as the usual Stalinist Communist indoctrination that was a part of every child’s education. Anything that revealed an alternative identity to the official Polish one was forbidden.

 

And yet, for all this, assimilation was impossible because their classmates often would not let them forget that they were not Polish. Children laughed at their accents, taunted them, and sometimes physically bullied them. ‘Ukrainian’ children were not invited to Polish children’s houses. Their difference from their classmates, and their isolation from any other children like themselves, made their situation quite similar to that of the ‘German’ children in Scandinavia. While there do not yet appear to have been studies into the life chances of these children compared with others, as there have been in Norway, it would be reasonable to assume that they probably suffered similarly high rates of anxiety, stress and depression in later life. Even more than the children of Germans in Norway, today many Ukrainians once again openly speak of themselves as a distinct group in Polish society – something that would have been unthinkable in the early 1950s.

 

The one experience that united all these people – and indeed all of the millions of others who were displaced from their lands after the Second World War – was a desire to return ‘home’. This was, however, the one act that was forbidden above all others. Those who tried to return to their villages in Galicia found themselves faced with angry militiamen…

[‘Thought’ itself is forbidden by the ‘class’ system… i.e., by ‘states’… ‘states’ require submission… and subjection of the human thought-process to Authority… means the end of it. We can only claim our full earth-inheritance… by growing beyond the Obedience demanded of us by states… which means… by growing beyond the falsely conceived ‘need’… for ‘the state’. Until then… we will be endlessly jerked around… violated… disrespected… limited… damaged… our human possibilities mutilated… by them. – P.S.]

Those who tried to return to their villages in Galicia found themselves faced with angry militiamen, and were threatened with violence or imprisonment. For others, there was simply no point. In the absence of the communities they had grown up with, their villages were no longer the idealized places they remembered. When Olga Zdanowicz tried to visit Graziowa many years later she found nothing there. ‘The village had been burnt – it didn’t exist any more.’

 

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“By the end of 1947 there were barely any ethnic minorities left in Poland.… This process, which destroyed centuries of cultural diversity in just a few short years, was accomplished in five stages. The first was the Holocaust of the Jews, brought about by the Nazis but facilitated by Polish anti-Semitism. The second was the harassment of Poland’s returning Jews, which, as I discussed in the last chapter, caused them to flee not only Poland but Europe as a whole. The third and fourth were the ejection of Ukrainians and Lemkos in 1944 – 6, and their assimilation during Operation Vistula in 1947.” – [Much thanks and gratitude are due to Keith Lowe for this amazing and important work. While our reading of our excerpted chapters concludes with this chapter, I hope folks will read and help promote the full work… which is full of lessons for all of us globally… as we face the challenge of ending the system of class which brought the horrors he has recorded down upon us… – P.S.]

 

The ethnic cleansing of Poland in 1947 is not something that can be considered in isolation. It was a product of many years of civil war, and more than seven years of racial violence that had begun almost as soon as the Germans had invaded the west of the country in 1939. It saw its foundation in the Holocaust of Polish Jews, particularly in the massacres in Volhynia, and the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists in these and other atrocities. After the war, the expulsion of Poland’s ethnic minorities was carried out with the explicit help of the Soviet Union, but the subsequent displacement and assimilation of Ukrainians and Lemkos was something that Poles conducted on their own initiative. Operation Vistula was effectively the final act in a racial war begun by Hitler, continued by Stalin and completed by the Polish authorities.

 

By the end of 1947 there were barely any ethnic minorities left in Poland. Ironically, given that Ukrainians had been responsible for much of the initial impetus, the country was far more ethnically homogeneous than its neighbour. The ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’ espoused by the OUN was never achieved – particularly in the eastern parts of the republic, which kept a large Polish and Jewish minority even while western Ukraine was busy exchanging populations with Poland. ‘Poland for the Polish’, by contrast, was by the end of the 1940s not merely an aspiration, but a fact.

 

This process, which destroyed centuries of cultural diversity in just a few short years, was accomplished in five stages. The first was the Holocaust of the Jews, brought about by the Nazis but facilitated by Polish anti-Semitism. The second was the harassment of Poland’s returning Jews, which, as I discussed in the last chapter, caused them to flee not only Poland but Europe as a whole. The third and fourth were the ejection of Ukrainians and Lemkos in 1944 – 6, and their assimilation during Operation Vistula in 1947.

 

The final piece of the ethnic jigsaw in Poland, and one that I have not yet touched on, was the expulsion of the Germans. This, along with similar actions across the whole of Europe by other countries, is the subject of the next chapter.

 

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[Much thanks and gratitude are due to Keith Lowe for this amazing and important work. While our reading of our excerpted chapters concludes with this chapter, I hope folks will read and help promote the full work… which is full of lessons for all of us globally… as we face the challenge of ending the system of class which brought the horrors he has recorded down upon us… – P.S.]

 

Beginning with the December 7, 2014 show, we will begin thinking through more specifically what it means to set our activism… to a global beat. We’ll have those discussions on the page: “Embracing Global Goals, Scope and Action: Becoming Global Actors… Claiming the ‘All’”… – P.S.

 

[Brothers and Sisters: Zora… Du Bois… Martin… and Malcolm… did not love Black folks any less when the scope of their active love… the concern of their activism… widened to encompass all commoners under class. We all have our families and Tribes… but… as Fromm put it: “to love one’s flesh and blood is no achievement…” and certainly… in this moment… much more is needed from us.

 

Next week we will begin thinking through more specifically what it means to set our activism… to a global beat. We’ll have those discussions on this page: “Embracing Global Goals, Scope and Action: Becoming Global Actors… Building Global Actions”… – P.S.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[From John Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe From Late Antiquity To The Renaissance]

 

(During the May 18, 2014 show, we finally remembered to add Alice Miller and Jeremy Bentham to the “puzzle pieces” we needed to see what ‘power’s plans are… and in the May 25, 2014 show we remembered John Boswell… for his The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe: From Late Antiquity To The Renaissance….)

 

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[Francisco Goya’s Third of May, (1808)]

 

 

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Thandiwe's Word:

ithedawn@gmail.com

...on the challenge of beginning to create the alternative:

“The imagination has to be stimulated – that imaginative part of ourselves that manifests our dreams, through that fire, that passion, that is our art. Asking questions stimulates that process of figuring out, visualizing, and manifesting what we want. But we need each other's help in order to do that – to manifest our power – and we've been cut off from helping each other.”

© Nas2EndWork (the NEW)

http://www.nas2endwork.org