Kerala: The The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part II

Unidentified Vietnamese women and children before being killed in the My Lai Massacre.In the public domain. Author: Ronald L. Haeberle

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Pointless War #1: The War on Communism/Socialism/Equality/Human development

Consider the battle against communism.  Communism was supposed to be so evil that stopping it required slaughtering millions of people, developing expensive and expansive programs of government torture and mind control, and terroristically overthrowing multiple democratically-elected or otherwise popular governments throughout the world.  But Kerala is the most communist state in India.  Since 1957 it has regularly elected communists into governance.  These were and are free, contested elections by private ballot, with rights to assembly, protest and dissent constitutionally guaranteed.  And yet (or therefore, or “as luck would have it”) Kerala is also an Indian standout with regard to education and literacy, high life expectancy, low infant and maternal mortality, and high voter turnout.  Other regularly communist-electing states in India also stand out in these regards.  In regions outside India, even places like “totalitarian1” undemocratic communist Cuba and “totalitarian genocidal2” China (communist for four decades, and still ruled by The Party) stand out in human development terms: life expectancy, mortality, and literacy.  Of course questions of voter turnout are moot in both Cuba and China.

Pointless War #2: The War on Terror/Islam/Religion

And consider also religion, the bugaboo of contemporary War on Terror ideology.  The genocidal part of “totalitarian genocidal” China, mentioned above, reflects China’s dictatorial enthusiasm to one-up the US “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) program by murdering and brainwashing Uighur Muslims.  Uighurs hail from Xinjiang, a Western Chinese province that is, not coincidentally, just north of Tibet.  The US CVE program is rooted in an Islam-impugning junk science that China has only been too happy to capitalize on, as part of their longstanding hostility to religion.  The US CVE program reflects the fact that in the post-9/11 political economy and propagandaverse, the US increasingly resembles China.  In our 21st century “War on Terror” culture, religion, especially Islam, is supposed to be so evil that we Americans must eviscerate all our own rights and freedoms, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and wantonly destroy cradles of civilization to stop it.

But in Kerala, religion-including-Islam doesn’t look so bad.  Kerala is about as religious as the rest of India (that is, very religious)—with approximately half of other Indian states being more religious than Kerala and half being less religious.  Kerala is about 52% Hindu, 20% Christian, and 28% Muslim.  This means Kerala has one of the largest proportions of Muslims among the Indian states.  Nevertheless (or therefore, or as luck would have it), in addition to enjoying the human development benefits listed in the previous paragraph, Kerala is also a standout in women’s equality, and the undisputed leader in India with regard to LGBTQ rights, particularly transgender rights.

And various lines of research, many of them cited in an article I co-authored for Religion, Brain and Behavior (“Religion and Oppression”), suggest that in general religion is okay.  Specifically, the core God-worshipping element of religion appears to attenuate oppression and oppression-related prejudices and inclinations to violence.  Religion does not, as War-on-Terror ideologists would claim, cause or exacerbate oppression.  As for the supposed perils of Muslim religiosity, supplementary analyses for the same article suggest that among Muslim majority countries, the more religious their populations are, the freer they are.

Footnotes

1. The word “totalitarian” evokes a sense of the impossibility of normal life due to a total, and often death-threatening, intrusion of the state into all aspects of life.  Cuba and China are more “lapsed totalitarian” in this regard, and their relics of totalitarianism blend into ordinary authoritarianism.  Near-constant fear of the state varies greatly individual by individual and group by group, and “normal life”—with humor, friendship, parties, intellectual discussions, social enjoyment, etc—abounds in both countries.  The ever-present menace of the state often registers as little more than a faint background hum.

2. The word “genocidal” evokes a sense of organized millions-killing mass murder on the scale of the Holocaust.  It can also refer, though, to attempts to exterminate a culture or religion by mostly cultural means like “education”, or sublethal/minimally lethal means like deportation and resettlement.  These attempts are often backed up with only a punctuated drip of state murder, rather than a roaring river thereof.  China is genocidal in this latter respect, though by no means unique—a “soft” genocidal zeitgeist is sweeping countries of various ideological histories in recent years, including India and the US.  The fires of war could turn these relatively soft genocides hard pretty quickly though.

Liberate the camps! An open letter to the nation of Israel

German concentration camp, WWII
U. S. concentration camps- June 11, 2019, at Border Patrol’s Weslaco, TX, Station

Dear Citizens of Israel,

We did it for you during World War II. Now it’s your turn to help us.

The U.S. government-sponsored concentration camps on our southern border are racist, immoral and unconscionable. Over 50,000 refugees are being held indefinitely in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions—including infants and children, separated from their parents.

Trump continues to ignore criticism and refuses to take any action that would demonstrate even a shred of humanity toward those imprisoned. White supremacists cheer for an autocratic leader who keeps pushing to see how much he can get away with.

Does this seem familiar?

Israel, as one of the United States’ strongest allies, is in a position to influence and intervene. This madness must stop. The unthinkable cannot happen again. We need your help.

Liberate the camps! We did it for you; now you do it for us.

Respectfully,

Pat Daniel and Kathie Malley-Morrison

Outraged and ashamed citizens of the U.S.

And ye shall inherit the whirlwind (or learn to live in gratitude and grace), Part 1

by Stefan Schindler

Central oval of James Thornhill’s (1714) “Triumph of Peace and Liberty over Tyranny” on the lower hall ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England; photographed by Roger Stevens in 2009. In the public domain,

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. Never before has humanity been endowed with such fantastic opportunities. Never before has humanity’s survival been so precarious, the threat of self-extinction looming on the near horizon.

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one; and though prophets and sages, assassinated statesmen and pacifist activists have long issued warnings about the urgent need for sane and pragmatic reform, their voices have been muted by a perpetual blizzard of epistemological confetti and jingoistic sloganeering aimed at the citizen populace by sophistic politicians and mainstream media technocrats serving the imperial needs of the richest of the rich.

Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Noam Chomsky adds the necessary twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” Hence the enduring potency of Marx’s maxim: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”

America repeats the unlearned lessons of history.  Founded on noble ideals undermined by genocide and slavery, America wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy, not knowing she is destroying herself.  Men at the helm of the ship of state, swollen with greed and skilled at sophistry, steer civilization toward the abyss.  Only the blind can fail to see The Statue of Liberty weeping for another lost chance for human history to be something other than ignorance, violence, and ignoble self-betrayal. With all too few individual exceptions, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is the difference between neurotic and psychotic.

Howard Zinn, noting that the problem is not civil disobedience, but, rather, all too pervasive obedience, declared: “Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty.  Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.” 

Albert Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”  He said further: “Money only appeals to selfishness and always irresistibly tempts its owner to abuse it.  Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?”

James Thurber once offered the parable of a man standing on his cabin porch watching a forest being cut down to provide timber for the building of an asylum in which to house people driven insane by the cutting down of forests.

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “The message here is clear: We cannot rely on either mainstream political party to take us back from the abyss. Stay tuned as Stefan expands further on living in the gratitude, grace, integrity, and activism necessary for peace and social justice.

When will they ever learn?

by Kathie MM

I cannot even say those words (“When will they ever learn?”) without Pete Seeger’s ballad, “Where have all the flowers gone,” flooding my brain. We had such optimism in the sixties, despite the vile and catastrophic assassinations of JFK , MLK,, and RFK, such hope that people would study war no more.  But the current era is more bloodthirsty and terrifying than ever as the government, the people behind the government, the arms industry, the NRA, and other war profiteers promote and benefit from deadly weapons and the sacking of lands far from our shores.

As is typical of bullies, those responsible for sending our young men and women to kill civilians (that’s who almost all the victims are) refuse to take responsibility for their devastating assaults on human beings and environments.  If the power brokers learned any lessons from Vietnam, it was how better to cover up dirty deeds and blame their victims for the violence unleashed upon them.

The Sacking of Falujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi (a frequent guest author on Engaging Peace), Richard Hil, and  Donna Mulhearn takes you behind the scenes of a more recent major bloodletting by the U.S. The book  is not only engrossing, but dares to speak truth to power, to describe events as experienced at Falujah not only by the three authors but by dozens of Iraqis who suffered from the second invasion of Iraq and its endlessly deadly aftermath.

Reading this book will not only provide you with hitherto unavailable information about the sacking of Falujah by the US and “Coalition Forces” but also about the events that led up to it—events that the US government is not eager to share or take responsibility for—and the role of that sacking and related events in the rise of ISIS. It will get you thinking about sociocide and urbacide, and information wars. It may also motivate you to think more about our government’s current rhetoric concerning “enemies” in other parts of the world and its threats regarding the selected enemies of today’s regime. You know who the current targets are. Can you ask your Congresspeople to resist complicity?

To view a video of my interview with Ross Caputi about The Sacking of Falujah, go to https://youtu.be/H7KatbFAI6U and send us your comments on this and all engaging peace posts.