*The following topic is posted in like a dozen installments. Each contributing cause to the topic is followed by a series of thought provoking quotations from a wide assortment of individuals, some Americans but many non-Americans too. Some alive but most dead. Like many aged souls, I cannot be sure my dissatisfaction with the priorities and behavior of my government is objective, or just the natural tendency of age to resent how the next generation handles about anything. But for me personally, never have I been so unhappy with my own country---to the point I am almost ashamed to be American these days. At the same time---again personally---never have I personally had it so good, sequestered away in a self constructed 'Garden of Eden', at least for now. Like in the bigger picture, Mother Nature bats last, and I too, will sooner rather than later, take that great leap in the dark, a meaningless footnote in the history of some Deistical evolutionary process.
WHY THE UNITED STATES, LIKE EVERY HISTORICAL EMPIRE, HAS REACHED THE EDGE OF THE PROVERBIAL CLIFF:
10. VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE----From the frontier days onward America has always been a violent culture. Guns, lynchings, murder, assassination, war, riots----whatever the nature of conflict, Americans more often than not sought solutions via the barrel of a gun. Might makes right has been the prevailing American foreign policy for decades now. Bush has given violence a new wrinkle----preventive warfare. According to this policy, if we think someone might cause us trouble down the road it is ok to attack them now, sort of cut them off at the pass.
It is not at all clear how much the tax cuts to the rich trickle down in our society, but the penchant to solve conflict through violence certainly does. We may give the appropriate ceremonial lip service to historical moral leaders like Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, etc. but, for all practical purposes as it relates to our government policies---these 'moralists' are fools, idealistic wimps lacking the necessary patriotic fortitude or strength of character to really teach domestic and global dissidents a few lessons, or preferably bomb them off the face of the earth. I guess we call our current policies tough love, albeit places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam must by now, after centuries of tough love by militarily powerful countries hell bent on realigning their politics, religion, or economic priorities----certainly by now they might be weary of so much 'tough love'. If there are any better examples of countries who have been repeatedly bombed back into the stone age, I can't think of any off hand. What is new, lets say in the last 50 years, is the entrance of the U.S. as a participant in this sort of venture. Once violence, as a national policy to solve conflict, becomes acceptable, it tends to become acceptable at all levels of our society. Whether it is our government using violence to solve conflict, some kid blasting other school kids, gang members killing each other, spouses assaulting or killing each other, torture of prisoners, police brutality, dog fighting for entertainment, sexual violence, violent music, violent movies, or whatever the scenario of the violence-----it all proceeds from the top down. If we cannot denounce violence as the national policy means to stop conflict, there is no way to curb the violence at any other level in our society. Bush is on TV practically every day defending violence to achieve his objectives. And he has the support of the weapons manufacturers, professional soldiers, gun owners, the religious right, and I guess most of those eager to teach this or that group of people a lesson or two. When people are in the mood to teach others a lesson or two, Christ, King Jr, etc. are not attractive role models. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not compatible with any mood to kick the shit out of this or that group of people. A more peaceful alternative approach is ok with the next door neighbor, at least as long as the neighbor has his religious and political priorities in order. Like Bush preaches----we can all get along if everyone learns to do things his way, or at least 'their way' if you want to include his clones.
I have seen some awful sights in my life, but Bush or Condalesa Rice on the TV insisting that others stop using violence to resolve their conflicts has to be the all time winner of awful sights. Others should stop the violence but Bush, by his own repeated insistence, is going to win conflicts by military slaughter no matter how many hundreds of thousands need to be killed, or how many millions need to be left homeless, or how many communities need be leveled into the Stone Age, or how many guilty or innocent need to be tortured, or how many billions of dollars need to be diverted or borrowed to fund massive wars on several fronts. I suspect this might be true: over the past 50 years no country in the world can match the United States in number of countries invaded---out right or via guerrilla armies financed by the United States-----or number of people rendered homeless by our military actions, or number of communities bombed into the stone age with our planes, or number of our own military dead via military ventures, or in money spent on guns, bombs, delivery systems, or have as many military bases in foreign countries as the United States. Let's face it: 750 military bases in 130 countries is the all time world record. But as Bush amazingly insists, with the proper contorted look of moral turpitude, if "other countries would cease sending men and arms into sovereign countries, these military and terrorist activities would cease". Yet most Americans cannot understand why Bin Laden is more popular globally than George Bush. How far down the ladder of morality and ethics have we slipped as a country to earn such widespread disdain by others across the globe? Of course it doesn't mean other countries are so righteous, but we like to think we are. Maybe we once were, up until the end of World War II, but like other advanced civilizations, time takes it's toll, and the same factors which have toppled every past advanced civilization are now present in our own advanced empire Time goes, it is often said. Wrong, time stays, we go.
Associated Quotations:
"Force---that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever erected for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obliged by the law of conflict into which you have plunged, to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you to commit harsh and violent action." (Auberon Herbert)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children. This is not a way of life....Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging itself on a cross of iron." (Dwight Eisenhower)
"We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die." (Wystan Auden)
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love." (George Santayana)
"It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior." (George Santayana)
"When the rich wage war it is the poor who die." (John-Paul Sarte)
"I have known war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." (Douglas MacArthur)
"There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the war of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority (political or religious), long standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge." (Roger Bacon)
"Think of the dull functioning of dogma, age after age. How many millions have been led shunted along dogmatic runways from the dark into the dark again.....endless billions, and at the gates, dogma, ignorance, vice, cruelty, seize them and clamp this or that band upon their brains." (Theodore Dreiser)
"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on the Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics." (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." (Blaise Pascal)
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals." (William Penn)
"It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies." ( Bertrand Russell)
"Birth control, family planning and population limitation are most important in any effort to bring real peace into the world." (Margaret Sanger)
"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God..... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire." (George Santayana)
Violence proceeds from fear and "Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth---more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive, and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid....thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back---fear that their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves prove less worthy to the respect then they have supposed themselves to be." (Bertrand Russell)
"The greatest power in the world today is the power to change........The most reckless irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." (Karl Dutsch)
"(Violence) has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. When she moves it is in wrath; when she pauses it is amid ruin. Her prayers are curses, her god is a demon, her communion is death, her vengeance is eternity,, her decalogue written in the blood of her victims, and if she stops for a moment in her infernal flight it is upon a kindred rock to whet her vulture fang for a more sanguinary desolation." (Daniel O'Connell)
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.....A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions......A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.---"Ah, so you are sure to be misunderstood."-----is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton and (Terrell Owens), and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall lean nothing".
(Thomas Huxley)
"Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it." (Howard Mumford Jones)
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie---deliberate, contrived and dishonest---but the myth---persistent, persuasive and realistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears." (John Kennedy)
"Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate". (John Kennedy)
"Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable." (John Kennedy)
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." (John Locke)
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection, is a poverty stricken day, and a succession of such days is fatal to human life." (Lewis Mumford)
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Issac Newton)
"A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory." (John Steinbeck)
"Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.....violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. (Rollo May)
"A devotion to humanity...is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously blood-thirsty." (James Baldwin)
"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him." (James Baldwin)
"I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to one, may appear to be error to the other." (Gandhi)
"Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit.....Aggression is the expression of frustrated expectation of love." (Ashley Montagu)
" Women's rights, men's rights, ---human rights---all are threatened by the ever-present spectre of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat." Rosika Schwimmer
