Tag: Amy Goodman

“Omnipresent surveillance:” Dystopian society in our global era, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm
by Reverend Dr. Doe West

by Anthony J. Marsella, PhD

There have been many suggestions about what is needed in response to the growing national security state of the United States.  Responses have come from around the world, and many names are now familiar (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Mairead McGuire, Amy Goodman, Johan Galtung, Chris Hedges). Here are some options for building a more enduring and effective response:

  • Become informed: Become informed and educated about the scope and sources of the national security state threats to privacy and behavior control. This can only be done by reading credible sources, reading beyond popular media, and questioning sources with specific hidden agendas (i.e., corporate, military).
  • Engage in activism: Become as active as your circumstances permit in peaceful protests that may include opinion writing, letter writing, petition signing, phone calls to elected representatives, and joining discussion groups via the internet or in real time. Become as active as your circumstances permit with regards to supporting alternative information sources (e.g., Transcend Medial Service, Truthout, Guardian, Engaging Peace), and supporting pathways to prosecution for those violating Constitutional and civil rights. 
  • Commit to non-violence: Be committed to non-violence and non-killing as viable pathways for bringing about change. This may well make change a slow and arduous process, and it may never be completely successful. Yet the course of violence, insurgency, and revolt can only lead to destruction and death, as we are witnessing in the United States and around the world.

The challenges are many and complex; there is little reason to believe citizens can easily reduce or eliminate the massive national and international surveillance network. If change is to occur, it will be because hope as an essential enduring human virtue can inform action and that non-violent action will be undertaken.

Footnote 1: The term “omnipresent surveillance” is taken from John W. Whitehead’s recent article, “The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No longer Fiction.” Information Clearing House. June 11, 2019. See also Rutherford Institute, Virginia, USA

References:

Bacevich, A. (2012). The short American century: A post-mortem.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chumley, C. (2014). Police State USA: How Orwell’s nightmare is          becoming our reality.   NY: WND.

Deneys-Tunney, A. (July 12, 2012) Rousseau shows us there is a way      to break the chains from within. The Guardian, London, UK.

. Harris, S. (2010).  The watchers: The rise of America’s surveillance         state. NY: Penguin Group.

Hedges, C. (2015). A nation of snitches.

Mills, C. W. (2000). The Power Elite. NY: Oxford University Press

Priest, D., & Arkin, W. (2011). Top secret America: The rise of the new American Security State. NY: Little Brown.

Slavo, M. (July 31, 2019). Satellites Have Already Started Watching Your Every Movement.

Taggart, D. (2019). Americans Don’t Trust the Govt, the Media, or Each Other: Fading Trust is “Sign of Cultural Sickness and National Decline.”

Unger, D. (2012). The emergency state: America’s pursuit of absolute security at all costs. NY: Penguin Press

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu.  He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. His TMS articles may be acessed HERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This article, lightly edited and abridged, originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 Aug 2019. TMS: “Omnipresent Surveillance:” Dystopian Society in Our Global Era .

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Posted on by kathiemm

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I  watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975,  I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories. 

 

CRAZY WISDOM

Posted on by kathiemm

By Stefan Schindler

 Do you occasionally feel that you’re about to go crazy? Or think that perhaps you already have? Do you often feel like Don Quixote, vainly tilting at windmills? Yes, probably. But then you remember the meaning of the term Greater Fool. A Greater Fool is one who exhibits greatness in commitment to peace, no matter how foolish that commitment seems in a world intent on going mad.

You remember that you are not alone. You have comrades. Millions of brothers and sisters equally committed to kindness and compassion. They too are Greater Fools, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Romero, Tolstoy, Emerson, Tagore. Like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein. Like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Like Mark Twain, William James, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn. Like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, George Fox, Matthew Fox, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama. Like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon, the Trung sisters of Vietnam. Like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. John and Robert Kennedy, too. Greater Fools, one and all.

And, yes, The Beatles. “All you need is love,” they sang, and you hum it every day. War without end seems to be the world’s way, and yet you never cease to chant, “Give peace a chance.” The Statue of Liberty weeps. Mother Earth is crucified. Storm clouds darken the horizon. And yet you sing: “Here comes the sun.” Yes, I am you, you are me, and we are all the walrus. We have each other. We keep the faith. We persevere.

Chogyam Trungpa, combining Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, called it Crazy Wisdom. So, yes, it’s OK to be a little crazy, as long as your craziness is that of the Greater Fool. Humanity may elect lunatics for leaders, and go about their business sleepwalking through history. Yet you, at least, are awake. Indeed, you are part of The Great Awakening. You belong to The Global Peace Abbey. It welcomes all and has no walls. We are warriors for peace, on the cutting edge of evolution. There is no greater satisfaction, no greater joy, no greater service.

So rejoice, my friend. The angels sing your praises, and lend you unconditional support. The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.

“I Pray Daily to Awaken from the Nightmare of History” (James Joyce), Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm

Noam Chomsky at Vancouver, Canada in 2004.  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Duncan Rawlinson.

By Stefan Schindler

Terry Eagleton’s British article on the public danger of “The Death of the Intellectual” (Red Pepper Magazine; October 13, 2008) is lucid, astute, and right on target. It applies even more to America than Britain.

The demise of the public intellectual as a partner in civic discourse is symptomatic of social decay, and points directly to the fact that the primary function of American education and the mainstream news media is to ignorate, not educate, liberate, stimulate. How else did we end up with Reagan through Cheney-Bush to Trump and company?

Eagleton mentions Noam Chomsky as a courageous and virtuous paradigm of the public intellectual; that is to say, of the philosopher as concerned citizen, writing with the fervor of Thomas Paine. Another such example for the last half-century was Howard Zinn, whose courage of conscience echoed that of Emerson and William James.

Howard Zinn May 2009.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: User B-Fest of Athens indymedia

 

I was honored to co-present The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award to both Zinn and Chomsky, and to nominate Michael Parenti for the same – public intellectuals in the like-minded company of John Dewey, Richard Rorty, John Pilger, Victor Wallis,  Lewis Lapham, Abby Martin, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and of course Terry Eagleton – all names utterly unfamiliar to most Americans.

Meanwhile, the corporate negation of net neutrality follows close upon the heels of the corporate takeover of American colleges and universities, now bloated with high-paid bureaucrats, slave-waging adjuncts, and debt-ridden students in hock to the banks who are the prime culprits in America’s economic apartheid and neoconservative slide toward unrepentant fascism. And, of course, the primary function of the American military is, as it long has been, to make the world safe for the depredations of the Fortune 500.

Michael Parenti. 2008. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic & 1.0 Generic license. Author: Willa Madden.

 

Hence Parenti’s observation: “Third-world nations are not under-developed. They’re over-exploited.”

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