Tag: I.F. Stone

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. 

 

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm
For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

By Stefan Schindler

The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.

In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.

The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the  Depression of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.

Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.

Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:

“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”

 

TO EDUCATE OR IGNORATE: That is The Question

Posted on by kathiemm

 

Skull and crossbones. In the public domain,

by Guest Author Stefan Schindler

“Fascism ought more rightly to be called corporatism, since it embodies the fusion of state and corporate power.”

Benito Mussolini

“That’s how wars start.  Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.”

Karl Kraus

 

“America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”

   Mark Twain

 

To manipulate, ignorate, stupefy, distort and deceive – such is the primary function of America’s mainstream news media, political establishment, and compulsory system of miseducation.  George Carlin declared: “That’s why they call it the American dream.  You have to be asleep to believe it.”

The Weapons of Mass Dysfunction employed by the national security state and corporate elite have also infected America’s colleges and universities.  How else to explain the explosion of high-paid bureaucrats, the implosion of student minds, a 50% faculty of adjunct teachers with slave-labor wages, the astronomical rise in tuition, collective student debt now more than a trillion dollars, and the graduated lunatics who assume positions of political power?

Gore Vidal once observed that in the United States of Amnesia, “words are used to confuse so that citizens vote against their own best interest.”

Recalling Plato’s cave parable, 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 koan-like conclusion: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.”

Did I use the verb “ignorate” in my opening sentence?  Yes indeed.  We have the word “educate.”  Why not “ignorate” – especially if it names the fundamental rot at the core of American politics and culture?

Of course, not all graduates are historically illiterate and ethically warped.  Great teachers, informed writers, astute students, ethical businessmen and women, brilliant artists, morally authentic political activists and office holders – they are by no means absent in American society.

From William James and Mark Twain to I. F. Stone and Martin Luther King; from Mother Jones and Emma Goldman to Hellen Keller and Dorothy Day; from Woody Guthrie and Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo and James Baldwin; from Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan – the United States has always had its politically enlightened rebels.  Of course, they don’t agree on everything.  But they are independent thinkers, and they do follow in the footsteps of Thomas Paine.

Nevertheless, their ideas are mostly drowned-out by the blizzard of epistemological confetti blown relentlessly at the American populace by mainstream news, ubiquitous advertising, and pseudo-“conservative” talk radio.  Result?  An American economic apartheid more egregious than the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression and World War Two.

What is to be done?

In addition to dismantling the American empire – the largest empire in world history, with a thousand military bases scattered across the globe – we can start by integrating “ignorate” into our educational and collective vocabulary, as a way of diagnosing the linguistic poison that more or less began with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, was perfected and championed by Newt Gingrich, and climaxed in George W. Bush and Donald Trump, generating the divisive sophistry that went unchallenged and was silently sanctioned by Republican Lite (i.e., the almost equally soulless Democratic Party).

In addition to “ignorate,” we also need to employ the word “interbeing.”

Interbeing names the socially relevant discovery of quantum physics: All things are thing-events, and all thing-events are interconnected, interdependent, interpenetrating.  To be is to interbe.

This was illustrated by Chief Seattle when he said: “What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.”

Interbeing was also long ago affirmed by Socrates, Jesus and Buddha when they said that what we do to others we do to ourselves.  Hence they recommended a pragmatic path to the Peaceable Kingdom by the individual and collective practice of the Golden Rule at the heart of the Torah: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

If we commit to moving in that direction, we could inaugurate an educational and political revolution that would light the world.

Bio: A graduate of Dickinson College, guest author Stefan Schindler taught philosophy, psychology and religion for 40 years at institutions of higher learning, including The University of Pennsylvania, La Salle University, Berklee College of Music, and the Boston and Brookline Centers for Adult Education. Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.