While Obama worries about appeasing Israel and Jewish vote at home, as well as being pressured to support threats of an Israeli attack on Iran, the government of Israel beavers away as usual, creating new facts on the ground.
Here (portions of which are quoted below) is an editorial in Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers, describing one way the Israeli government continues to plant seeds for the eventual cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank by exploiting the paralysis it created in what is absurdly known as the “peace process.”
Discussions on Jerusalem were postponed to a later stage of the final-status negotiations, but it was never agreed that this interlude be exploited to create facts on the ground.
Haaretz Editorial, 7 December 2011
As the diplomatic process has sunk deeper into hibernation, acts whose sole purpose is to tighten Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem have multiplied. Thus even as the Palestinians have given the Quartet a proposal on security arrangements and permanent borders in the West Bank, Israel is advancing proposals to change the master plans of neighborhoods over the Green Line.
Spinny Note: My favorite translations of Sun Tzu's classic are Thomas Cleary's for a political/phlosophical orientation and Samuel B. Griffith's for a military orientation. Readers interested in a modern application of Sun Tzu's ideas, and especially the art of using Cheng & Ch'i operations to unravel an adversary's decision cycle, will find them embedded throughout Col. John Boyd's seminal study of conflict, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, especially Patterns of Conflict and The Strategic Game.
The below two documents are again rocketing around gold circles and beginning to gain traction outside of gold circles. Both are worth a full reading. The truth will come out eventually–right now these two documents simply illuminate the path toward the truth.
The current President and Congress are destroying our Constitutional rights, our planet's climate, and the vestiges of a social safety net, and you are obsessing over a freak show of self-hating homosexuals and anti-intellectual intellectuals jumping through hoops in a corporate media circus with Ringmaster Donald Trump. Is this a good use of your time?
The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you're concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn't know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me?
President Obama, the United States Congress, and the Federal Reserve are united in their generosity toward Wall Street and the war machine — both financial generosity and the equally generous provision of immunity from legal prosecution. In the Bush era we were locked in free-speech cages, and we raised hell about it. Now we're locked in jails, beaten, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and otherwise brutally assaulted, and . . . wait! Look over there! Is that a presidential candidate who wants to publicly declare his desire to secretly murder Iranians? How outrageous!
For the love of everything decent, the current president is right now murdering Iranians, and it's not very secret. What in the hell is the matter with you people?
Illegality is over, says Harold Koh (“the good John Yoo”). This is the same guy who claims massive slaughter by bombing of foreign nations is neither war nor an act of hostility as long as no significant number of U.S. citizens die immediately in the process.
How can illegality be over, when the crimes have not been prosecuted and have in fact been legalized? The current Department of Justice, at the direction of President Obama, has radically expanded claims of state secrets and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The current president has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment (Bagram is booming!), prisoner abuse, assassination (including of members of the 5% of humanity we're supposed to care about), war making in direct violation of the will of Congress (Cf. Libya), and the radically expanded use of drones to do much of this dirty work. And you want me to care that some house-broken elephant who's been trained to parrot platitudes is in favor of child labor? Really?
It is not pleasant to face, but our children are done for if we proceed down either of the paths you are obsessing over the choice between. Behind curtain A is increased plutocratic militarization. Behind curtain B is the same damn thing. It's an evil choice. Choose which of your children should be shot. This one. No, wait. This one. It is not a choice we have time to dignify with our attention. It is not something we should waste 10 months of inaction and misdirected resources on.
We must do what has finally, finally, finally been begun. We must occupy public space.
We must move the entire culture. We must reshape this society. We must drag both political parties and everybody in them and the majority of the population which has long since grown sick up to the eye balls of both of them, we must drag everyone kicking and screaming to a better place, to a place where we do not choose between putting 65% or 62% of discretionary federal spending into war preparation without an enemy in sight. What kind of a range of options is that?
This government will halt the foreclosures only after we have halted the forclosures. This government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. This government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And this government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don't want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street's opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory.
Self-government is not a spectator sport. Elections are not reality shows. There is much more at stake than a soap opera. The first step, and it is a more difficult step than sleeping in a tent in the ice cold rain, is to cease giving a damn what some individual who is stripping away your rights and the fruits of your labors really feels in his heart of hearts. Stop it. We do not have the time. Politicians who make speeches opposing everything they do must be pushed to match action to words, not treated as if words speak more loudly than actions. That attitude is what leads us to focus on what a gaggle of misfits with no power and less wisdom have to say about each other, just because they're on the teevee screen.
Get serious. Get independent. Get principled. And stay nonviolent toward everything in the world except your television.
Al Martin, former Navy intelligence officer and former Wall Street broker, former Iran-contra co-conspirator with Ollie's Follies, is starting to write about the possible use of the many civil unrest internment camps built in the US by Halliburton and related contractors. In his view, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), makes it possible for expanded use of the US military and expanded powers for law enforcement to “contain” the unemployed in work camps–which might be a good thing, in his view. [The bill passed the Senate but has not passed the House at this time.]
Our government, under a program called REX 84 (Readiness Exercise 84) runs over 800 detention camps nationwide. They are all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners should the US government institute martial law.
The US Air Force dumped the cremated, partial remains of at least 274 troops in a landfill before halting the secretive practice in 2008, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
No matter who is specifically to blame here, this story is certainly a powerful metaphor for what's wrong with worldwide society. Our systems have taken on a life of their own. They've become massive machines that no one is steering. And we've become fodder for them. Some people have more power than others. But mostly these machines are blind collectives that are beyond the control of any single individual or group. According to the article, senior Pentagon officials never authorized this decision and were unaware of it. But anyone who's ever been in the military knows that the culture tends to force underlings to get creative when it comes to fulfilling objectives. Orders are not always doable but they must be done anyway. And the culture is a collective entity.
What's likely is that the person in charge of the US Air Force mortuary at Dover Air Force Base was facing a dilemma created by his superiors. And the bottom line must have been money. I'm guessing that budgetary pressures, time deadlines, and political correctness (not calling attention to piles of body parts) were the motivating forces here. These conflicting forces probably left the head of the mortuary with only one option: dump the remains as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The article goes on to say that “an additional group of 1,762 remains . . . were also disposed of in this manner.” Knee-jerk reaction tends to drive us to search for an individual to blame. The Tea Party will want to blame Obama. The Democrats will want to blame Bush policies. The military will want to blame the lowest man on the totem pole. And the officer who applied all the pressure to the man who actually made the decision, probably has an airtight defense; because he probably never told him exactly how to solve the problem, and he probably said that he didn't want to know, or need to know (all discussed verbally and in private, no doubt); because the military also trains people to cover their asses at all costs! It's a basic survival skill.
The real culprit here is likely to be the collective. And collectives tend to dilute the responsibility of individuals. That's what makes collectives so dangerous. We would become extinct as a species without them, but they have grown so massive and powerful that top-down management no longer works. The solution, of course, is open-source intelligence.
We are no longer driving these collectives. No one is. They are driving us! Even the most powerful leaders are disposable. But the collectives that they manage go on and on without them. And if they try to reform them, they will be quickly ejected and replaced. Our collectives have become blind machines. And only truly open collective intelligence, collective wisdom, and other open-source systems can save us from them.
But we must remember that although this incident can be used as a metaphor for the problem, the incident itself is not a metaphor but a reality. Our collectives have become giant meat grinders. That too is a metaphor. But the networks of cause and effect it describes are all too real. Who did the heroes who were unceremoniously dumped in a landfill serve? Ultimately they served a blind collective and were discarded by the same.
A blame game or a witch hunt can't save future heroes from a similar fate. If the Pentagon wants to do justice to these men and their families, they must blame their own military culture, which is what led to this disgraceful and undignified end. They must start openly challenging the blind aspects of the collective they serve. And citizens (in whose name the collective operates) must support them in the effort.
A good model might be truth and reconciliation, which waives individual culpability in order to get at the truth of the matter. And in this case I think the truth will liberate everyone. The collective can't be tried and sentenced and sent to prison. The collective can't be embarrassed or humiliated. The collective has no need to avoid responsibility or defend itself, because the collective is an abstract entity with no life other than what we give it.
In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce. He outlined a critique and a plan that changed America.
Complete excerpt below the line — real history killing real people.
The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history
Richard Drayton
Guardian, 7 December 2011
Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government
“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.
Amazon Page
Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.
Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.
. . . . . . .
What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.
