Idiots of the World, Unite!

Robert C. Koehler               Common Dreams                April 23, 2015

“Sir, you are an idiot.” Wow, an insult wrapped in such old-fashioned politeness. I let the words hover and reach, as I always do, for peace: for clarity, connection, common humanity.

Last week I raised the idea of unarmed policing, as practiced in half a dozen countries around the world. I wasn’t calling for immediate gun surrender but, rather, the diversion of human energy away from short-sighted, violent responses to conflict situations — at pretty much every level of society, from interpersonal to geopolitical — and to the complex, courageous, creative task of building a culture of peace.

Being called an idiot for making such a plea is to be expected, of course — it happens all the time, and I relish it because it means my words have reached people on the other side of the great political divide. That’s what building peace is all about.

How will human society let go of violence — “good violence,” which is the most seductive and most destructive of all — when its utterly crucial necessity permeates the media, permeates collective thought? Good violence is so simple, so “surgical.” You take out only the problem situation and innocent people everywhere are instantly safer. Then you close your eyes and refuse to see what happens next.

As violent conflict runs wild in the Middle East, the result, the New York Times glibly and mindlessly informs us, “is a boom for American defense contractors looking for foreign business in an era of shrinking Pentagon budgets.” The article also explains: “Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion on weaponry last year — the most ever, and more than either France or Britain — and has become the world’s fourth-largest defense market.”

And: “Qatar, another gulf country with bulging coffers and a desire to assert its influence around the Middle East, is on a shopping spree. Last year, Qatar signed an $11 billion deal with the Pentagon to purchase Apache attack helicopters and Patriot and Javelin air-defense systems. Now the tiny nation is hoping to make a large purchase of Boeing F-15 fighters to replace its aging fleet of French Mirage jets. “American defense firms are following the money. . . .”

Wow, gosh, a “shopping spree” — so reminiscent of George Bush’s injunction to the American public to go shopping as the War on Terror was being launched. What the Times article fails to mention, however, as Qatar and Saudi Arabia and other anti-Iran U.S. allies go shopping for state-of-the-art weaponry, is that hellish conflict zones all over the planet — aflame with violence catered by U.S. and other Western defense contractors — are not merely killing innocent people directly but wrecking life-sustaining social structures and causing the displacement of millions of people, who are left without the means to live.

These conflict zones include Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, according to Thalif Deen, writing for Inter Press Service. And the United Nations, charged with the task of assisting the displaced, is overwhelmed.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist.           [Abridged]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/04/23/idiots-world-unite

Lapwings take sanctuary in a Northern Ireland prison

Michael McHugh                   Independent/UK                20 April 2015

 One of the world’s most threatened birds has found a sanctuary within a prison that houses Northern Ireland’s most dangerous inmates. Prisoners serving life sentences helped create the habitat for breeding lapwings. The birds have made their home on a marshy no-man’s-land at HMP Maghaberry, dominated by razor wire and lookouts behind reinforced glass.

The six-acre patch of waste ground lies between the perimeter fence and the wall of the jail, near Lisburn in County Antrim, known for holding dissident republicans, sex offenders and murderers.

Swampy, short grass and the lack of predators such as foxes have created the ideal conditions for breeding chicks, said retired prison guard and gardener Denis Smyth. “We have to work together as a team, the prisoners and myself. We have a very good relationship with them; there is never a problem,” he said.

Lapwings, which are about the size of pigeons, have suffered a population decline of 50 per cent during the last 25 years as changes in farmland have impacted on habitats.


COMMENT: This brief news item reminds me of an almost forgotten book, “Birdman of Alcatraz”, which was later made into a film with Burt Lancaster in the title role. It was the moving story of Robert Stroud, a man with a fearsome reputation, now in solitary confinement in prison, who finds a sick bird has flown into his cell. Looking after this bird, analyzing its illnesses and bringing it back to full health, gives him a new reason for living. He becomes a different man, and in the process he finds his advice sought after by owners of birds throughout the US.

This change, which came about by accident, is echoed by the calming influence of some reforms in our NZ prisons. At Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison can now be seen, in some prisoners’ cells, tanks containing colourful fish. It seems that spending time observing how the instinct to enjoy life expresses itself with different forms of animal life, and encouraging this by providing the needed environment – this has a valuable spin-off effect that humans need. We are not meant to live in a sterile artificially created state of being. When this is imposed on us we suffer.

Not only so. We are meant to respond to life with what we may call an affectionate welcome. Life is more than getting and spending. Growing up in a family teaches us to love, parents first of all, but this soon extends to others. And it is almost inevitable that this instinct leads us to an attachment to some activity that exercises a compelling attraction for us. If this is a healthy activity we blossom. But what if this is not a healthy interest, perhaps even socially and legally disapproved of because it damages society?

When this is regarded as serious the answer prescribed can be punishment, perhaps even confinement. But we could consider other ways. A phrase that has been around for over 200 years attracts me: “The expulsive power of a new affection.” Offering a fuller life to a species under threat, finding satisfaction in some aspect of healing, developing a skill that gives pleasure to the hearer or beholder – one of these or some other form of life-enhancing activity has been the healing factor that has helped to bring renewal in many lives.

Fortunately there are some in our Corrections Department who are looking for such alternatives, even for long-time offenders. Sadly there are also some who see punishment and imprisonment as the preferred way to go. In the 1930s and ‘40s lads of 16 to 18 years of age were routinely sentenced to two or three year terms of Borstal “training” which, for most young offenders, was disastrous in its effects. Researchers analysed the records of these lads in later life, and found that about 75 % had gone on to become adult criminals. Borstals were discontinued when the Justice Department had digested these statistics.

We honour men like John Robson, and later, Judge Andrew Becroft and others, who introduced more human and subtle ways of dealing with young offenders. But there is still some way to go. 

-Arthur Palmer

One man's appeasement is another's diplomacy

Paul Thomas                       NZ Herald                    Apr 10, 2015

Twenty-six years before Fifty Shades of Grey, the late Chrissy Amphlett, frontwoman of Aussie rock band Divinyls, pointed out that in affairs of the heart (and other body parts) "it's a fine line between pleasure and pain". Likewise sport. Martin Guptill played the innings of the Cricket World Cup and made many commentators' team of the tournament, but if the West Indies hadn't spilled a relatively straightforward catch he wouldn't have done either.

Likewise war. The Battle of Waterloo ended the first French Empire, consigned Napoleon to exile on a volcanic rock in the South Atlantic and ushered in 50 years of peace in Europe, but according to the victorious commander, the Duke of Wellington, it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". When it comes to things that could go either way, the just-announced embryonic deal over Iran's nuclear programme takes the cake.

Led by the Presidents of the US and Iran, some are hailing it as a historic breakthrough that defuses an explosive situation and has the potential to jolt the Middle East out of its death cycle of terror, civil strife and proxy war. Others, however, are denouncing it as a monumental folly likely to end in a mushroom cloud.

From Tel Aviv to Texas the Iran deal is being compared to the 1938 Munich Agreement. In this scenario, Iran is Nazi Germany, Barack Obama is Neville Chamberlain, the hapless dupe of a British Prime Minister who swallowed Hitler's lies hook, line and sinker, and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is Winston Churchill, the voice in the wilderness speaking the inconvenient truth that no one wants to hear.

Munich is synonymous with the policy of appeasement " making concessions to a tyrannical regime with imperial ambitions in the hope it will be placated and modify its behaviour accordingly.

Chamberlain conceded the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in return for Hitler's assurances that there'd be no more land grabs. He returned home to a hero's welcome, waving a piece of paper and proclaiming that he'd secured "peace in our time". But Hitler was far from satisfied. A year later he seized two more Czech provinces before invading Poland, thereby triggering World War II.

With the benefit of hindsight, the whole appeasement narrative seems somewhat overblown. It suggests Chamberlain set such store by his piece of paper that he sat back twiddling his thumbs while Germany prepared for war. In fact, he stepped up rearmament, pressed France to do the same, doubled the size of the Territorial Army, created a Ministry of Supply to expedite provision of the armed forces and introduced conscription.

Eight months into the war Chamberlain gave way to Churchill, although he continued to play an important role in the War Cabinet. After his death in late 1940, his enemies had a field day, notably in the form of a pamphlet Guilty Men. The demolition of Chamberlain's reputation was completed by Churchill in his six-volume The Second World War. As the man himself purportedly said, "history is written by the victors".

A footnote: an arguably more foolish and catastrophic example of appeasement occurred at the Yalta summit in 1945 when Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt swallowed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's promises to allow free elections in Eastern Europe. Churchill is probably the most quotable and quoted statesman in history, but you don't come across this gem very often: "Poor Neville believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin."

Churchill's criticism of appeasement wasn't that it promised peace while delivering war but that war was inevitable so it was humiliating and counter-productive to cut worthless deals at the expense of third parties. "England has been offered a choice between war and shame," he said in the post-Munich Commons debate. "She has chosen shame and will get war."

The current situation echoes Munich in one respect. Critics of the deal argue the US shouldn't settle for anything less than a capitulation that would render the Iranian regime's position untenable. Given the regime will never agree to such a deal, the critics are following Hitler's example of pretending they want to give peace a chance while being hell-bent on war.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11430283

Easter and Resurrection

Ian Harris                               Otago Daily Times                    April 10, 2015

Another Easter has come and gone – for retailers another chocolate egg and bunny bonanza, for the workaday world a welcome holiday break. And for churchgoers a moment to again mull over the powerful human story of Jesus’ suffering and death, and puzzle what to make of resurrection.

A vast gap yawns between those who insist that the various New Testament accounts of Jesus being raised from the dead are accurate historical records of what happened that first Easter, contradictions and all, and others who interpret the story as myth, written to convey profound religious insight according to the understanding of that distant time.

Literalists would argue that if the events of Easter took place today, the stories would be told in exactly the same way. The other camp would say such a view not only misses their point, but today’s secular reality makes it untenable: for them, resurrection is best understood not as a physical phenomenon, but as one of Christianity’s core religious symbols.

Symbol of what? To answer that, it is necessary to distinguish between two ways of referring to the figure around whom Easter revolves. There was Jesus the man, born and bred like any man, who became a teacher, healer and sage and was executed when he challenged the religious and political status quo. And there was the messiah or Christ, a title bestowed on Jesus by his followers as they came increasingly to identify him as the one anointed by God (that’s what the word means) to initiate a new way of being in the world.

Around the title “Christ” has accumulated a mass of supernatural barnacles originating in ancient concepts of the universe, God, Jesus’ relationship with God, and humanity’s place in the midst of all these.

Over the past 80 years many leading theologians have found the old metaphysical framework, which still permeates traditional Christian doctrine, to be well past its use-by date. So they have chipped away at the barnacles in a bid to give the core Judaeo-Christian heritage a natural home within the world as we know it today. Chief casualty of that has been the supernatural Christ. Some people dispense with any concept of Christ at all, and insist the human Jesus as role model is quite enough.

There is, however, another approach which avoids both immersion in supernatural speculation and the wholesale rejection of the transforming experience of the earliest Christians. It also opens the way to a positive modern understanding of resurrection. Yes, this approach would say, Jesus was crucified, died and was buried. And yes, resurrection followed – but it was not the human Jesus who was raised. It was the Christ, the Jewish messiah figure as newly experienced and imaginatively refashioned by those on whom Jesus had left the deepest impression.

Today this Christ can still be seen as risen – not as Jesus’ dead body miraculously restored to life, but in the minds of his followers as an archetype of love, grace and transformation. (An archetype is an original model, type, or symbol that resonates with human experience. For psychologist Carl Jung it is a pattern of thought or symbolic image rooted in the collective experience of humankind.) Christ as archetype is rich in such associations. The figure is expressive of the lover, the caregiver, and the visionary. And since in Jung’s view the potential for realising these is already latent within us, Christ as archetype of love, grace and transformation is available as a living dynamic within our human consciousness.

I suggest that’s what those early followers of Jesus experienced. And as men and women of their time, inevitably they interpreted their experience within the religious categories open to them, including the supernatural and a God beyond.

In recent times, some have upbraided the apostle Paul for dressing Christ in supernatural garb as a divine rescuer, though for centuries that image met a felt religious need. But Paul also uses a key phrase that can be read as foreshadowing the notion of Christ as an archetype in human consciousness. He writes repeatedly of life “in Christ”. The in-dwelling Christ was central to his thinking.

This is obviously not the human Jesus – that would be impossible – but the Christ archetype, carrying all that Jesus had come to mean for love, grace and transformation into the lives of everyone who gives it room to grow. Christ, shorn of supernaturalism, then stands as the mythic core of Christian faith.


On this understanding, Jesus died. The Christ arose. And 2000 years on, Easter computes.

http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/338641/christ-anarchetype-love-grace-transformation

The Real Nuclear Threat

By Robert C. Koehler                         Common Dreams                      09 April , 2015

If war were only “itself” — the violence and horror, the conflagration and death — it would be bad enough, but it’s also an abstraction, a specific language of self-justifying righteousness that allows proponents to contemplate unleashing it not merely in physical but in moral safety.

War, the abstraction, is an instrument of policy, an “option” that can be waged or threatened to get one’s way. It is always contained and sure of itself, limited in its goals and, of course, necessary. Its unintended consequences are minimal and quickly neutralized with an official apology, then forgotten. If we didn’t forget, the next war wouldn’t seem like such a viable, enticing option.

The next war that has been gestating for so long now is the one with Iran, and its proponents, I’m sure, will do what they can to dismantle the framework of the agreement recently negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 nations. The incompleteness of the agreement — the fact that only Iran has accountability in the realm of nuclear weapons — raises profound questions about the future of the planet, but this flaw is obscured, certainly in most mainstream coverage, by the “controversy” that the agreement has been reached at all, supplanting the possibility of a military response to Iran’s nuclear energy program.

The interests opposed to the agreement, which wouldn’t be possible without mutual trust, maintain a belief in nothing but one-sided force to achieve their ends: either ongoing sanctions against Iran or military action. Regarding a military takeout, Robert Parry recently wrote at Consortium News: “Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities could cause a massive human and environmental catastrophe, unleashing radiation on civilian populations and possibly making large swaths of Iran uninhabitable.”

Here we begin to get at the extreme recklessness and foolishness that is the context of so much geopolitical pontification. War is evoked with such brainless ease. A dozen years ago, Team Bush and its legion of political and media crusaders were screaming for the invasion of Iraq. One pseudo-argument for the invasion invoked World War II: We don’t want another Munich (where Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reached an agreement to allow Nazi Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia).

War and its justifications spring eternal. Scholar Peter Conolly-Smith, for instance, has pointed out that Munich has been invoked to justify virtually every American military action or threatened action since World War II: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq. I suggest that hearing this justification for a potential new military action should alert one to the shallowness of the thinking behind it.

The deeper problem with the P5+1 agreement with Iran is not the controversy it has generated among the bomb-Iran contingent but the unacknowledged hypocrisy of the P5 nations — the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain and France — which, of course, are all nuclear powers themselves. They have made no real effort to pursue global nuclear disarmament by getting rid of their own arsenals, as they agreed to do when they signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which went into effect in 1970.

Four and a half decades later, and despite the end of the Cold War, many thousands of nuclear weapons, in nine nations (also including Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, none of which have signed the non-proliferation treaty), remain poised to destroy Planet Earth. The focus on the possibility that Iran might someday develop a nuclear weapon too, while perhaps not irrelevant to the goal of global disarmament, is a minute part of the enormous danger we’re in. Indeed, the United States is in the process of investing billions of dollars to rebuild its whole nuclear arsenal, “including the warheads, and the missiles, planes and submarines that carry them,” according to Stephen Young of Union of Concerned Scientists, writing at Defense One.

And as Greg Mallo of the Los Alamos Study Group has noted, three privatized nuclear laboratories — Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore — are behind the immense investment in upgraded, more destructive nuclear warheads. This aggressive pressure from the American business sector is a lot more frightening than any aggression emanating from Iran, and may indicate where the real push for war comes from. War is profitable to too many people. We need a peace treaty with the military-industrial complex. [Abridged]
Robert C. Koehler http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/04/09/real-nuclear-threat