WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- WARNINGS 1 -
“…Citizens seeking to introduce changes in the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill Thomson, Translator, Kegan, Trench & Co., London, 1883, page 376.
Me, I’m just a cheap, craven stay-at-home with no claim to prophecy. My sole intention, while writing Learner, is to catalyze a more bearable world into which to reincarnate. There’s no way to predict how the world will turn out after one’s gone; but flying blind, I find PeaceWorld more welcoming than WeaponWorld.
As I review this text, its cosmic presumption stuns me. No special talent or privilege entitles me to claim your attention; no lofty reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly complacency, public or private ambition or literary merit. When I found decent work, I was just a clerk and a distracted one at that. Nevertheless, I must claim your attention here. No-one else bothered to take up this crucial task; so I felt compelled to do so. This book may be the most important text you read. That’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve stayed up late nights, reviewing endless do-overs of the same botched political experiment and muttering, “At least one of these should have worked out to spec!” I still dare hope. Learners constitute a Nation among nations, a state of being within the State. In our own quiet way, once properly inspired, we can call upon enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners assemble in the dark, realize how numerous we are and the sovereign sway we hold over the world; once we rally around those ideas, we will be unstoppable and destined for glory. It won’t matter how wretched human isolates become with their sterile pecking orders, or how much work it will take us to sort things out. WeaponWorld’s grim combats past and present have prepared us for those to come in support of PeaceWorld.
Your appraisal of Learner could make you dizzy, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic. We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Our first review will be insolently superficial and subject to myth-based denial at every page-turn. Once this crisis has passed, we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first few chapters of Learner to take in its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Then resume your perusal at random across the following three Sections:
SECTION 1) Why we’re in this mess;
SECTION II) How we approach PeaceWorld; and
SECTION III) What results we should expect.
The first and harshest Section, “Why,” stretches beyond the midpoint of Learner. “Why” is so incendiary, its first-time readers risk burnout. Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook great evils we’ve been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem wearisome to you at first, mind-numbing later, and soon unbearable. Your subconscious will recall every aversion therapy you suffered as a child, to get you to quit. You will grow frustrated with this reading, then nauseated by it and soon enraged. You will have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to its dregs. Take tiny sips of this sour mash and find some sweeter syrup elsewhere, perhaps at the titty of TV.
Just don’t give up. I could just as well have called these three Sections, Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet “How” lists regrettable tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter “What” sketches peaceful alternatives to the weapon technologies we submit to today, assuming global majorities have already grasped Why and How.
This text is intended for Learners to come. Its discontent should have been our patrimony and it was, since forgotten. I leave the next Sections: Who, When and Where, to you beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of proof.
Learner isn’t chiseled in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and professional alike, should chew through each of its assumptions. Their debate may call up a brilliant Learner Commonwealth whose new mantra will be, “What if the sky were the limit?”
You might have seen some movie in which ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and security. By midway through the story, the Good are stunned; no one knows what to do next. Then someone – perhaps Ruth – says, “Hold on, I have a plan.” Rather than turn away in despair, listless bystanders start paying miraculous attention. Inspired, they turn into heroes. By then, for the sake of dramatic continuity, the camera cuts to the triumph of the Good.
This book lists vital steps between “no plan” and “plan in action.” During this critical but no-fun stage, we should discuss our plan, expose its weaknesses, suggest other alternatives and coordinate the timing and chronology. Let volunteers take on tasks that fit their special interests and talents. All you reductive meliorists who’ve pounded your steering wheel in a stalled car for the last few centuries, start your engines! Shake awake those who’ve dropped out from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a scheme; you are reading it. We are at this vital yet tedious stage of the process. Hurry!
A few warnings before we begin. This book’s erratic prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculations make hard reading. We’re going to make warfare illegal across the planet, here, not bake a cake. You’ll find neither quick fixes nor simple sound bites in these pages, none of the TV pablum you’ve grown used to. Click the Back key if that is all you came here to find.
What’s more, every chapter of Learner was crafted as a stand-alone pamphlet, any one of which a searcher could find independently on the Internet. Incidentally, most of my chapter headings weren’t listed on the first ten search pages of Google and other corporate search engines, which favored irrelevant trash on and off that topic. Anyway, you will run into lots of repetition when you read this book. Good! You have never heard enough of this stuff.
Treat Learner as a rough guide, clearer than foggy old Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber.
Evenhandedly, this book appeals to ecstatic Nobel laureates, berserkers with nothing left to lose, idealists adrift, madrassa dreamers, oriental bonzes, Talmud scholars and Bible seminarians -- none of them satisfied -- prep-schooled sellouts and ghetto luminaries defying evils wriggling just beyond their own brown study. It speaks just as much to every Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze of weapons and peace, as to my childhood ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address these words just as much to this year’s class at the War Academies as to next year’s crop of middle school prodigies.
The best among you combed the library stacks of weapons administration looking for the literature of peace, to no avail. This book sketches what we were driven to discover and failed to find.
California dreamin’, I surf riptides of chaos and swim the undertows of paradox. Irritably, I toss aside treasured concepts and take up much-maligned ideas. My message is very biased. Hunting down sly platitudes, I climb way out on shaky limbs, farther than you may care to follow. You’ll find no “detachment”, “disinterest” or “balance” here, as those terms are misused today. Given the complexity of this topic, my literary numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
I turn rhetorical cannons against the weapon mentors who drilled me on them. Horrified and enraged, I cite any fallacy more useful than its “logically correct” counterpart. I have no use for proponents of “logical analysis” who permit children to starve and turn their back when this awkward topic intrudes on their blank spirit. To uphold PeaceWorld, Learners will pirate every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call that lulled us to sleep up ‘til now.
A longish lifetime ago, as I was testing the shaky legs of new-foaled opinions, my father challenged me thus. “It’s easy to condemn institutions,” this charming Sir Bayard told me. I’ll always remember him as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche: a knight both fearless and beyond reproach.
That’s a tricky combination, if you think about it. Doing harm would be relatively easy, wrapped in some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of war!” Less easy to do good from fear of evil consequences, but not much more rewarding. The true goal would be to do good fearlessly. My father strove to do just that during his life, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the term. No lesser accomplishment is worthy.
Do you consider yourself fearless? Fine. Do good without counting the cost, and prove it to us. A trick you will have to play in your head, for your entertainment and the world’s wellbeing. Can you manage that?
This last paragraph may be essential reading for sociopaths who recognize themselves and for their friends who see it in them. To them, I suggest they reread it carefully. That might ease their trouble and let them break new trails to PeaceWorld.
“Condemn institutions? Don’t bother,” that thoughtful cavalryman told me, “unless you can come up with better ones.”
I've knocked myself out, since, guessing those alternatives. As a child of the greasy 50s, I found capital-R Revolution revolting. Its runny blemishes revealed more about it than its watery promises. Among its worst failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing more than the unbearable present with frequent backslides. Revolutionary dialectics and all their conventions struck me as so much cheap blah-blah, culture’s inflammatory reaction to orthodoxy’s nonstop insults.
No great book called On Peace exists, even though students cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me; I searched the stacks in vain for On Peace.
Midway through my mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and sick of it and its countless lies and victims – I started combing through available libraries for a primer on the administration of PeaceWorld. You know, a real civics lesson for a serious cosmopolitan, up against the idiot babble of nationalists of every stripe? So what if it were nothing but a wild-eyed speculation? I’d have settled for that!
All I could find was a book called On War and other textbooks on weapon management. There were countless histories, pious tomes, pompous political screeds, literary soap operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles, each sustained weapon mentality and diverted attention from what should have been our primary study all along: PeaceWorld. They dealt with feelings, sentiments, technicalities, meaningless abstractions or some other nonsense, anything but PeaceWorld. As my readings grew more voracious and less finicky, they led me to affirmations of weapon mentality more and more ponderous, elaborate and boring. This mountain range of minutia aside, I found little else, to tell the truth.
Avid for the PeaceWorld primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would not dare call my work On Peace. Only a global consensus of Learners, assembled in the World Agora, could compose such a work under a thousand million titles. Nowadays, we benefit from none.
Even if Learner stands alone on a virtual library shelf under a non-existent call number (no Dewey Decimal for peace; the Library of Congress prefix JX no longer used), this scribe cannot claim copyright to the ideals of peace. The gold dust of peace mentality may be buried under the dross of weapon mentality, but it shimmers from all our masterworks. Where did Learner’s opulent forbears go? They disappeared, replaced by weapon Classics imposed on us all our lives.
IN FRENCH
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COMMENTS? markmulligan@comcast.net
- WARNINGS 2 -
