- PAROXYSMS

War has never begun and it has never ended; it is perpetual. Those who resisted it the  most perished most quickly.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- PAROXYSMS -

Here is why the expression “sic” accompanies every reference to “World War” in Learner. 

We’ve been taught that there were only two World Wars (sic), both dating from the 20th Century of the Common and Christian Era (CE). Another weapon lie. 

Here we are, two thousand years after the Sermon of the Mount; and look at the progress we’ve made! The ideological descendants of those who crucified Jesus remain in charge of the world with our consent. Like Gandhi’s assassins by proxy, in modern India.

War is not a momentary aberration the weak shun and the strong shut down as quickly as possible. Instead, World War is a constant practice of mankind. A long string of massacres is only interrupted by intervals of violence somewhat lessened to rearm, replace casualties and readjust alliances. Across the planet, perpetual war resumes soon thereafter. To be more precise, we should call World Wars I and II the Great and Greater Paroxysms of Perpetual World War.

Like a pool player racking up for the final break, we are setting ourselves up for the ultimate paroxysm.

What if, instead, we humbly placed PeaceWorld before the altar of God?

Many organized conflicts have  tormented the “known” world while slightly less regimented humans murdered one another with undocumented abandon. During the 18th Century,  wars of the “Enlightenment” raged around the world. 

Indeed, significant climactic variations triggered human attack reflexes. Those for the better exploded runaway population density; those for the worse depleted resources. Either way, war broke out anew.

During their metastasis and apoptosis, prior empires wore themselves out to achieve devastating casualties we moderns can induce with push-button ease. While disease and starvation scourged ancestral combatants even-handedly, we mix machete-wielding ethnicity with IED-vested pseudo-creeds, and torture renditions with drone strikes, then inject additional starvation and epidemics on demand. 

A thousand years from now, horrified archeologists (not necessarily Homo sapiens) will dig up many more blade-split, club-shattered, bullet-riddled, intentionally starved and diseased skeletons from 20th Century mass graves than from every older excavation. 

What an “advanced” civilization ours turned out to be!

Nation-states at war follow an aperiodic cycle, a chaos equation, a kind of Morse code of alternating war and pseudo-peace. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy concluded that America undergoes a social revolution – almost like clockwork – fifteen years after each of its wars (in Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 128). A Learner response to recent mayhem may remedy our knee-jerk, Reaganoid reaction to prior debacles ― or not. 

Besides, recent wars don’t stop to reset the clockwork. The state of perpetual war will prohibit the next revolution of the kind described above, won’t it? Instead, the political triumph of Trump and his psychopathic patrons nurtures mass paranoia and subverts the Constitution by leaps and bounds.

Each in turn, military age cohorts wreck their golden youth in war – win, lose or draw – then settle down. Recovering or not from the crippling aftereffects of combat, the survivors inculcate their offspring with the same lunacy they were raised on, then send them out to get shredded in turn.

Often enough, an epidemic of ultra-violence infects entire peoples. Almost every society has grappled with every neighbor. All of them carried out “World War” as deliberate foreign policy. 

At one time, Chinese Emperors drew their palace guard from a remote colony of Roman legionary slaves they’d received as tribute from victorious Parthians. That empire stood between Rome and China; all three of them fought and bartered through the ages.

Go anywhere where fertile soil, abundant minerals or (worse yet) sacred ground have drawn humanity. There, in the dirt at your feet, you will find traces of human blood spilt in organized violence. The artistic and reverential Neanderthals (whose brains were larger on the whole than ours) were hunted off the face of WeaponWorld. It is pockmarked with remnants of civilizations annihilated since.

“It is important to recognize that all wars are holy wars, not because of theological banners that may or may not be flown, but because the flowing of blood and the ripping of flesh consecrate the ground in the oldest and simplest sense we know. To kill and die on the battlefield, to mutilate and bleed, brings one before the dicing table of the gods, where luck and skill and courage combine to name the players definitively. Some will be chosen to play again tomorrow, some will be wounded and scarred, and some will be mutilated beyond recognition; but all have been gathered in the presence of the most real thing, to know and be known with the utmost clarity in an orgiastic festival of generosity and hatred. Where else can one find the opportunity to employ one’s deepest energies, so hedged and constrained as they are by common purpose? Where else can one freely offer them up to the gods to whom they so manifestly belong?” Dudley Young, The Origins of the Sacred: the Ecstasies of Love and War, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 224. 

Libraries great and small have attracted mass destruction ― from ancient China and the Near East to Dresden, Tokyo, Beirut, Amritsar, Sarajevo and Baghdad. Knowledge is power. Mass killing gets easier once the enemy has been blinded and deafened. (See Burning Libraries (BC)). 

Aryeh Neier wrote from the sniper-riddled rubble of Sarajevo, Bosnia, for The Nation magazine (May 3, 1993, p. 585). He concluded that a new pattern of assault is emerging. It does not target a specific prey population and its identity politics, as one might expect, but attacks urbanity in general. 

City dwellers develop a basic set of survival skills: cosmopolitanism, tolerance (and perhaps love) of strangers, broad-mindedness and a walk-a-mile-in-their-shoes attitude. The reduction of tension becomes an ingrained habit among strangers who share a city ― in short, they learn urbanity. 

There would be no need to lock your front door in a truly healthy community. The freedom of forgotten Babylon, of the world’s disappeared great-great grandparents. Abundance and justice brought forth by humanity and duty as foretold by Mengzi, (Mencius). Goodbye, technologies of devastation; perhaps a glimpse at the best ones and their peaceful application…

Enraged weapon sectarians (usually rural bigots and slum thugs) call for remedial doses of genocide, the minute these urbane tendencies call into question their stunted prejudices. They brand as cowardice any civilized attempt to ease their common dread of the Other. 

Magnificent cities ‒ renowned for their brilliant commerce, piety and hospitality ‒ were ravaged in recent years. A short list includes Jerusalem, El Qunietra, Nicosia, Belfast, Hue, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Jolo, Kabul, Beirut, Tehran, Baghdad, Herat, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Kuito, Ngiva, Monrovia, Grozny, Kigali, Oklahoma City, Mogadishu, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City, Baghdad, the cities of Palestine, New York City, Aleppo, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. Many more were targeted for this kind of destruction. Forgive me if I’ve left out your war-torn hometown. 

Alas, this all-too-human prejudice is nothing new. Chaosism – the deliberate infliction of ignorance, destruction and suffering for their own sake – may constitute weapon managers’ penultimate goal. Nuclear, biological, scalar and/or nano-biochemical omnicide will be their ultimate masterstroke ‒ to the limit of their weapon technologies ‒ assuming we let them get away with it. 

Maturing weapon states can saddle themselves with elaborate and pauperizing arms industries, but it will take them years to maximize weapon production, long after all their grandpas and child soldiers have marched off to die. Battle gear fabricated during peacetime will be obsolete when it’s most needed. Yet every nation-state stockpiles expensive and obsolete weapons – and deeds them to foreign nations in shady foreign aid schemes – to subsidize domestic weapons industries in peacetime. From then on, these weapons will get handed down to countries the least able to afford their upkeep and the most vulnerable to the ruin they induce. They wind up ripping apart the poorest of the poor.

The international massacres we witness sadly during evening newscasts? Almost all of them were masterworks of one or more members of the United Nations Security Council: that group shameless, unrepentant and so far unpunished for its unrelenting, collective betrayal of peace.

In the future, it will be up to the World Court to compensate victims at the expense of the Security Council every time the latter fails at its primary task: ensuring more security around the world, not less.

Defeated nations often win the technological arms race. They tend to adopt the most up-to-date weapons and lethal tactics. Since their obsolete hardware was destroyed, their replacement equipment is state-of-the-art. Too predictably, victorious generals prepare for the war they just won and therefore lose the next one. 

Every weapon government adopts at least a dormant weapon technology. In so doing, it attempts to deter takeover by more aggressive neighbors. Somnolent liabilities instead of emergency assets, these vestigial technologies atrophy, then bloat into excuses for elite corruption, political repression and undue taxation. We info proletarians exploit short-term profit, usury, environmental and workforce madness to try to satisfy ravenous weapons overheads. 

Instinctively, weapons elites worsen social stress. If no valid reason exists, some bogus Cause can always be found. Class privilege; economic shell games; race, ethnic or religious bigotry; meaningless cultural controversies; private drug use; faith, magic and hysteria: the more trivial the controversy and the more intractable it seems, the better. 

Political contenders renew factional bloodshed and police shadism. Any stupid excuse will serve. The silliest Prism rivalries are cultivated, shelved for a while and then dusted off at leisure. Smug bullies can always be recruited and handled with much less effort than the exceptional, charismatic peace leader who will only cooperate on behalf of truth, compassion and justice. Entire societies revisit the evil consequences (unforeseen, as usual) of this repression.

In Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, 1997, Dr. Roy F. Baumeister depicts three attitudes people take towards the social evils they share. 

·      First, those of victims. They magnify the harm done, their absolute innocence and the bestiality of perpetrators whose ancestors, descendants and imitators are cackling demons of evil incarnate. 

·      Second, evildoers try to erase public recall of the harm they’ve done. Creative explanations – both rational and irrational – justify much of their evil. Their own prior victimization figures prominently. Perpetrators find some way, any way, to shrug off their shame and ward off criticism after the deed. This reflexive reaction shields their pricked conscience, if not a psychopath’s lack of such. “Nothing much really happened. Their accusations are gross exaggerations. Everything that did take place was beyond our control. Someone else gave the orders. Besides, they deserved what they got.” Sound familiar?

·      The third attitude is perhaps the most serious: that of onlookers. Many react with studied indifference and passivity, concluding that their interference would not influence outcomes except to earn them the role of next victim. On the contrary, the slightest interference by random onlookers makes most perpetrators hesitate; it gives their victims a chance to defend themselves and slip away. The Nazis and Bushidos got away with serial political assassination and takeover because their generally hostile publics (“Who are these brown shirt fanatics?”) declined to hand them over to the police (more and more fascist) and oblivion when the fanatics were weak.

Every eyewitness to evil should grasp this basic truth: he protects himself best who obstructs it fearlessly, without hesitation. Learners must broadcast this lesson assiduously, while info elites tend to suppress it. “Let the authorities handle that!” while their agents look the other way or direct the pogrom.

My own experience as a common witness? I must admit that I’ve trivialized the suffering of victims I’ve observed, as much as the victimizers have. I am therefore as guilty as them in the long run. And my turn may come next, with no one’s intervention.

When unspeakable acts are committed with official sanction, survivors bear their share of guilt. According to Antjie Krog in Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (p. 123), German theologians formulated four categories of war guilt after World War II (sic): 

·      criminal guilt for the hands-on killers;

·      political guilt for politicians and their supporters who hired the killers;

·      moral guilt for those who hated the killers but did not resist them to the death; and

·      metaphysical guilt for the victims who survived.

Few German war resisters survived. The Nazis hunted them with Teutonic diligence. I suspect that many more Germans resisted than those publicly admitted. Honest folk (both in and out of uniform) were so fed up with sick Nazi games that they gave themselves away. Disposing of them, their families, their friends and paperwork would have been child’s play. The Nazis’ options were many: random firing squads, the camps themselves, removal to ground zero in burning German cities, or a one-way ticket to penal battalions on collapsing fronts. 

Those few who resisted were fed into nocturnal blast furnaces, like a handful of reluctant crickets in a thick cloud of loyal moths. A few bright flashes in a nighttime sky sparkling with uncounted sacrifices. Genuine Learners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance.

It’s a shame that so few monuments remain to consecrate their memory in Germany or elsewhere. This planet should be sown with heroic stone and bronze monuments commemorating personal resistance against tyranny. We need this inspiration.

I recall a bronze statue of a ragged American infantryman cradling a starved child in his arms: the apotheosis of the America’s epic intervention during World War (sic) “Two.” Here is an example: http://christianjstewart.zenfolio.com/bw/h29275cfb#h29275cfb. (Image link provided courtesy of Christian J. Stewart Photography).

We should turn that ideal into a universal mantra. Its antithesis should become as unthinkable as cannibalism.

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