Here’s the facts, ma’am. Just the facts, sir. The crushingly vivid facts are available, but you don’t see them on the corporate media. Those media serve the military-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex benefits from death and destruction. You don’t. Nobody does in the long run.
Please watch the trailer again and again and ask yourself, “Can I really do nothing? Can I turn a blind eye on the carnage my government is perpetrating in my name, in the phony names of peace and democracy? Can America be great while allowing a few powerful interests to profit from the murder of innocent men, women, and children elsewhere?” There is absolutely no moral justification for what is being done.
Watch the trailer. Find and watch the whole film. Forward the links. Search for the voices of peace. Fight despair. Identify and support the voices of peace. Vote for the advocates of peace, the opponents of war. You can do it and sleep better at night.
And if you need more facts, read Andrew Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East. Facing the facts is a bitter pill to swallow but if we don’t all take our medicine, the murderous epidemic being spread by the people in power who control our country and its resources will envelop everyone.
Global Monitoring Report. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: UNESCO.
by Stefan Schindler
Everyone has a philosophy – a “worldview,” a system of values and beliefs influencing actions – whether they know it or not (through conscious, critical reflection).
Bertrand Russell’s early twentieth-century call for philosophy in schools is mirrored in Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education. I refer readers to my web-posted essay “The Tao of Teaching: Romance and Process.”
Philosophy in schools (including for children) and in public spaces (Francis Bacon’s “marketplace of ideas”) is much in need of augmentation and enhancement, and this especially true in the USA.
Philosophy can, or should, enhance critical thinking skills and ethical reflection – from early youth through old age. However, what is often missing from the call for philosophy in schools is a necessary conjoining of philosophy with what Michael Parenti calls “real history” (as opposed to the jingoistic mush of social conditioning). To paraphrase Santayana: Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it (as the USA is intent on doing, over and over, at great cost to the nation and the world, including the biosphere).
Democracy and justice depend on informed citizens, and the USA has perhaps the most historically illiterate citizens in the modern world. Hence the disastrous results of America’s political process ever since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. People cannot think philosophically about – apply critical thinking skills to – what they don’t know. As increasingly evidenced in America, economic apartheid and historical-political ignorance go together. Hence the tragedy of increasing poverty, fear, prejudice, and scapegoating, and the equally tragic ease of political manipulation, in which citizens vote against their own best interest.
Recalling Plato’s parable of the cave, 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.” Hence Noam Chomsky notes: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” To which I add: Individual innocence is no protection against collective responsibility. And thus, to conclude: Insofar as the purpose of life is learning and service, and insofar as Buddha’s political philosophy advocates democratic socialism (what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness”), society should serve schools, not the other way around.
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.”
Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mathew Ahmann in a crowd.] This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Author: Rowland Scherman; restored by Adam CuerdenBy Guest Authors Anita McKone and Robert J. Burrowes
Note from Kathie MM: Anita McKone and Robert J. Burrowes are life-long peace and justice advocates. They were featured in Kathie MM and Tony Marcella’s recent series, dedicated to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. , on peace activists. Today, Anita and Robert begin a guest series with inspiring stories of Nonviolence Charter members.
Ella Polyakova is the key figure at Soldiers’ Mothers of Saint-Petersburg in Russia. In Ella’s words: “When we were creating our organization, we understood that people knew little about their rights, enshrined in Russia’s Constitution, that the concept of ‘human dignity’ had almost disappeared, that no one had been working with the problems of common people, let alone those of conscripts. We clearly understood what a soldier in the Russian army was – a mere cog in the state machine, yet with an assault rifle. We felt how important hope, self-confidence and trust were for every person. At the beginning of our journey, we saw that people around us, as a rule, did not even know what it meant to feel free. It was obvious for us that the path towards freedom and the attainment of dignity was going through enlightenment. Therefore, our organization’s mission is to enlighten people around us. Social work is all about showing, explaining, and proving things to people, it is about convincing them. Having equipped ourselves with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Russia’s Constitution, we started to demolish this dispossession belt between citizens and their rights. It was necessary to make sure that people clearly understood that, having a good knowledge of rights, laws, and situations at hand, they would be able to take responsibility and protect themselves from abuse.”
Lily Thapa is the inspirational founder president, in 1994, of Women for Human Rights, a single women group (WHR) in Nepal. WHR is an NGO “dedicated to creating an active network of single women on a regional, national, and international level.” By working exclusively with and for them, WHR is dedicated to addressing the rights of single women and creating a just and equitable society where the lives of single women are strengthened and empowered. “Rejecting the label “widow”, WHR ‘issued a national declaration to use the term “single women” instead of “widow.” The word ‘widow’ (‘Bidhwa’ in Nepali) carries negativity and disdainful societal views, which leaves many single women feeling humiliated and distressed.” Working to empower women economically, politically, socially, and culturally in order to live dignified lives and enjoy the value of human rights, WHR works at the grassroots, district, regional, national, South Asian, and international levels. Lily has pointed out that there are “285 million single women in the world; among them 115 million fall below the poverty line and 38 million conflict-affected single women have no access to justice; these women are last.” Recently, Lily was awarded the South Asian ‘Dayawati Modi Stree Shakti Samman’, which is “presented annually to a woman who has dared to dream and has the capability to translate that dream into reality.”
Christophe Nyambatsi Mutaka is the key figure at the Groupe Martin Luther King, which promotes active nonviolence, human rights, and peace. The group is based in Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in central Africa, and focuses particularly on reducing sexual and other violence against women.
