I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more.
Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.
I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.
Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it.
What is going on in America?
I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! - it's not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don't get it. I really hate to think its just the power of AIPAC... for if that's the case, then your government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don't think that's the reason... but I have no idea what it could be.
The America I know and like is compassionate, broadminded, creative, eclectic, tolerant and generous. You, my close American friends, symbolise those things for me. But which America is backing this horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can't work it out: I know you're not the only people like you, so how come all those voices aren't heard or registered?
How come it isn't your spirit that most of the world now thinks of when it hears the word 'America'? How bad does it look when the one country which more than any other grounds its identity in notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes and puts its money exactly where its mouth isn't and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?
I was in Israel last year with Mary. Her sister works for UNWRA in Jerusalem. Showing us round were a Palestinian - Shadi, who is her sister's husband and a professional guide - and Oren Jacobovitch, an Israeli Jew, an ex-major from the IDF who left the service under a cloud for refusing to beat up Palestinians. Between the two of them we got to see some harrowing things - Palestinian houses hemmed in by wire mesh and boards to prevent settlers throwing shit and piss and used sanitary towels at the inhabitants; Palestinian kids on their way to school being beaten by Israeli kids with baseball bats to parental applause and laughter; a whole village evicted and living in caves while three settler families moved onto their land; an Israeli settlement on top of a hill diverting its sewage directly down onto Palestinian farmland below; The Wall; the checkpoints... and all the endless daily humiliations. I kept thinking, "Do Americans really condone this? Do they really think this is OK? Or do they just not know about it?".
As for the Peace Process: Israel wants the Process but not the Peace. While 'the process' is going on the settlers continue grabbing land and building their settlements... and then when the Palestinians finally erupt with their pathetic fireworks they get hammered and shredded with state-of-the-art missiles and depleted uranium shells because Israel 'has a right to defend itself' ( whereas Palestine clearly doesn't). And the settler militias are always happy to lend a fist or rip up someone's olive grove while the army looks the other way.
By the way, most of them are not ethnic Israelis - they're 'right of return' Jews from Russia and Ukraine and Moravia and South Africa and Brooklyn who came to Israel recently with the notion that they had an inviolable (God-given!) right to the land, and that 'Arab' equates with 'vermin' - straightforward old-school racism delivered with the same arrogant, shameless swagger that the good ole boys of Louisiana used to affect. That is the culture our taxes are defending. It's like sending money to the Klan.
Comment: There is no such thing as an 'ethnic Israeli'
But beyond this, what really troubles me is the bigger picture. Like it or not, in the eyes of most of the world, America represents 'The West'. So it is The West that is seen as supporting this war, despite all our high-handed talk about morality and democracy. I fear that all the civilisational achievements of The Enlightenment and Western Culture are being discredited - to the great glee of the mad Mullahs - by this flagrant hypocrisy. The war has no moral justification that I can see - but it doesn't even have any pragmatic value either. It doesn't make Kissingerian 'Realpolitik' sense; it just makes us look bad.
I'm sorry to burden you all with this. I know you're busy and in varying degrees allergic to politics, but this is beyond politics. It's us squandering the civilisational capital that we've built over generations. None of the questions in this letter are rhetorical: I really don't get it and I wish that I did.
-- Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.
"They" don't know and they don't want to know; if they did, they would learn, which would require them to break the spell of generations... or as it has often been called "TRADITION! TRADITION!"
Or as Joe Withrow put it in his blog post today called 'Institutionalized Tyranny and Serfdom'
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So the kids are herded into government schools where their creativity, critical thinking ability, and common sense are systematically destroyed. They learn to unquestioningly obey their superiors at all times and to ask for permission to go to the restroom. To top it off, the kids are spoon-fed faulty history and they are taught that government is a righteous institution forever and always seeking to make their life better. Their teachers are mostly decent folks, mind you; they just don’t understand what government really is either.
Perhaps worst of all, students are conditioned to never seek a deeper understanding of the world around them and to never focus on discovering and developing their passion. Instead, students quickly learn that grades and social status are the only worthy goals to be sought after.
[...]
Of course there is a major gap that cannot be explained between these beliefs and what is actually taking place in the world which creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance within much of the population.
The simple fact is: this is not what a free society looks like.
[...]
Okay, so American culture may be a little schizophrenic. So what? Why should we care? We believe in laissez-faire and non-intervention, so how is it our problem?
Well, despite our best efforts we still have a sense of justice. We just can't keep quiet while the default programming converts unwary human beings with infinite potential into willing victims of the collectivist Ponzi.
You see, the default programming is designed to trick individuals into giving away their power – first to school teachers, then to professors, then to bosses, and always to government thugs and globalist bureaucrats. All of that personal power is then used to further strengthen the systems of enslavement. Of course the school teachers, professors, corporate middle managers, and the petty government officials and bureaucrats do not have a clue that this is what they are really doing – they have bought the propaganda proclaiming them heroes working for the common good of mankind.
Truth be told, we also have selfish reasons for opposing the default programming and schizophrenic culture – we are poorer because of them. The default programming has created a lifeless economy where zombies consume a very large percentage of the ever-dwindling wealth.
[...]
Liberty and Tyranny have done battle since the dawn of civilization. 'Democracy' was idolized in the early 20th century specifically to trick people into confusing one for the other. "We must make the world safe for Democracy!" Wilson cried as U.S. troops crossed the Rubicon.
The other warring nations on both sides must have looked at each other in confusion. "Why in the hell would anyone want to make the world safe for democracy?" they must have asked each other. After all, there was not one single nation that referred to itself as a democracy when World War I began. The Allied powers featured republican governments teamed up with imperial governments and constitutional monarchies to fight the Axis powers which consisted of imperial governments teamed up with both absolute monarchies and constitutional monarchies. There wasn't a democracy for as far as the eye could see.
There were 123 “democracies” in existence by the year 2007. By good old Woodrow's logic, peace and prosperity must have been raining down from heaven!
But as it turns out, roughly 500 million people have been violently killed in one government war or another since the world became safe for democracy. The Universe, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Of course we know nothing will change until it all comes crashing down and hits rock bottom with a resounding thud. We know the masses will just point and laugh; if they even pay any attention at all. They could not care less about our laissez-faire vision, and our disdain for regulatory democracy might anger them. But we also know that there is a Remnant out there. These are the people who have conquered the default programming and are pretty peeved about being lied to for decades. It is the Remnant that gives us cause for long-term optimism.
Here's to a laissez-faire vision of Liberty... and to a world safe from democracy.
www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-04/institutionalized-tyranny-and-serfdom