- ALIENS & CAVEMEN 1 -

Some outlandish speculations on pre-history for your dining and dancing pleasure.

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

LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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

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

- ALIENS & CAVEMEN (I) -

In order to inform yourself fully on this topic, you should review YouTube presentations by Dr. Steven M. Greer of Sirius Disclosure and his Unacknowledged movie.  Warning: these are very long presentations (many hours) and info-packed.  Get ready for that. They ring true to me and conform to the information I have gathered on this topic ― too confusing and voluminous to be ignored.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-heKCgFjlBA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0Rpy0Dhhs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31MCdfj8tNY

At this juncture, Learner’s speculations branch out in many directions. 

Interstellar space offers something like a savanna ecology ‒ just scaled-up ‒ and enormous abundance for those diligent and mobile enough to earn their place in it. Once we evolve beyond our vegetative, static, planetary phase; outer space promises unlimited stellar energy and hydrogen, more than enough for a plant-like, sun-powered civilization like ours, that feeds at great waste off a tiny fraction of the solar energy available. 

Our present technology pegs us as microbial “decomposers”: global leaf mold, if you will. Indeed, we juggle sunlight, plants, animals and miscellaneous dirts to produce cities, armies, waste heat and light, carbon dioxide, methane, rust and hard membranes of concrete and asphalt. In so doing, we stir up a witch’s brew of toxic refuse, solid and liquid waste and megatons of human flesh.

“The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by as much as a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 29. 

Humanity may break free from its Earth-bound primitivism. In that case, we may stray into the living space of other herbivorous civilizations. Let’s hope each side has graduated from its “heroic hysteria” phase of weapons atavism. 

Then again, there may be predatory civilizations out there, fast, stealthy and lethal by design. “They may treat us,” Paul Lackman suggests, “the way European colonists treated the rest of the world.” I had in mind a much more lethal interaction: like that between a big fish and smaller ones, or the way a worm eats its way through the soil. Their hunger might tempt them to engulf all life that showed the least sign of weakness, down to planetary bedrock. 

These days, a bubble of electromagnetic signals pulses ever louder from the Earth. As we speak, its radius spans over one hundred light years: thirty times the distance to the nearest star. This bubble is spreading at the speed of light: the radio signature of a second sun that’s not there. It includes 2,056 electromagnetic pulses from idiot-savant nuke tests, (http://www.mayomo.com/103218-time-lapse-map-of-all-nuclear-explosions-since-1945) as well as the snap, crackle, pop of particle accelerators. 

If any ravenous entity could sort out this signal from the sizzle of the sun, they could. Our ultra-primitive radio signals might attract them, the way the bleats of a calf tucked out of sight by its mother would betray them both to hungry hyenas. 

Their ingestion of the biosphere might become lethargic if we put up a proper fight to begin with. Defense against this type of predation may be the only justification for our inbred ferocity. For the same reason, rams bash each other’s skulls during ritual courtship duels — so that their offspring will better fend off mountain predators.

Robert O’Connell’s study of weapon management, Of Arms and Men, concludes that most battles are ritual duels fought between equivalent armies. They resemble courtship competition among ungulates and other beasts. Like rutting males, each army risks the injury of a tolerable number of its soldiers (cells), only to withdraw and perish unfulfilled if the affair goes south. 

He dubbed this phenomenon “intra-species warfare” interspersed with “extra-species” fights during which a more heavily armed aggressor dehumanizes and exterminates its victims until weapon parity, attrition and/or genocide bring on martial exhaustion. 

We could face both challenges in the future, whether fighting among ourselves or among aliens. 

In his compilation, A History of Warfare, John Keegan presents two kinds of warfare: true war and real war. 

True war is the Clausewitzian ideal, chock-full of weapon justifications: the Chinese School of Law, Realpolitik and Machtpolitik (the politics of “realism” and power). It shows off elaborate battle preparations; the self-sacrifice, professionalism, noble bonding and peacock panoply that professional soldiers love to boast about; the elitism that lets them set themselves above non-combatants, etc.

Real war is the art form of the bully and the tyrant. It sets loose routine massacre, vandalism, rape, terror and the degradation of conscience. It is the disgraceful way we express our reptilian neural wiring and paleomammalian reflexes that govern human fear, authoriphilia (love of authority) and aggression.

Weapon mentors take great pains to disguise real war as true war. 

John Keegan characterizes as typical of Western combat, the face-to-face, fight-to-the-finish, spear point scrums “invented” by urbanized Greek farmers. He distinguishes them from cavalry/missile duels fought on the steppes of ancient Asia and during industrial combat. To him, the latter are examples of “sissy” war. He favors the symmetry of steel-thorned hedges of foot soldiers harvesting each other's flesh, and of Enlightenment regiments playing “firing squad” against one another in tightly packed checkerboard squares. 

This preference may be a matter of taste or perhaps atavism. Were the first “battles” waged (aside from the assassination of intimates and Freud’s murder of the father?) between small bands of hunter-gatherer-scavengers during the harvest season over precious patches of crops, clean water and fishing holes. Did they wield the first generation of weapons adapted from hunting, gleaning and fishing gear? 

It may be that the primitive tactics of warfare – akin to fire-starting and other displays of sentience – were first tried out as child’s play (inspired by a shaman’s crazy mimes?). The most promising games were taken up more systematically by mothers and elder sisters, then adopted by young males and made commonplace when they took over from grizzled elders who never accepted newfangled tricks in the first place. This according to The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes, at http://www.spiritual-endeavors.org/free/100monk-pre.htm. 

This well-worn path of primate adaptation has been the common freeway of Learner revolution. I expect that World Peace will evolve along the same lines, once pass away those who don’t want to have anything to do with it. Hopefully, they’ll do so quietly, without burning up what’s left of the planet before they leave.

Note Hitler’s last wish: pull the whole thing down around his ears once his master plan failed: a common aspiration among failed psychopaths. It’s likely they would rather cauterize the planet if they can’t possess it entirely (read rape it and us). Thus, climate “skeptics.”

Nations always want their warriors to attack in hand-to-hand combat; this despite their recruits’ sensible aversion to that option. Throughout ages, weapon mentality propounded the “spirit of the bayonet” regardless of the casualties on both sides. The most likely outcome of two sets of men clashing with long pointy sticks or similar weaponry is a carpet of agonizing bodies never unconscious soon enough, with both sides’ blood-crazed leaders calling for fresh troops to exploit the back and forth of mutual carnage. 

Shaka Zulu punished his warriors who lost their spear in battle. He did not allow his soldiers to throw them (the customary fighting method, even among the legions); instead, they were to thrust and slash with them in close combat. It was said Shaka’s recruits could not take a wife until they had killed an enemy in battle: another sublimation of the sex drive into military violence. 

The Zulus endured runaway population growth and resource depletion: the same problems we face today. So did all the South African tribes prior to the Mfecane (“Crushing”). Whole valleys were carpeted with human bones during this Zulu-initiated genocide of neighboring Bantu tribes, aggravated by them in turn as they fled from the Zulus. This devastation took place just after the first waves of European tribal immigrants flowed into Africa to compound its military problems. 

If forced to choose between these fighting styles, one could favor the swift-mounted herder of helpless foot soldiers into petrified or routed herds ripe for slaughter. During countless mobile battles of annihilation – Carrhae, Adrianople, Angora, Liegnitz I, Mohacs, Little Big Horn, Kursk and the Southern Golan – this aspect of the threat formula was perfected. Unlike Keegan’s pedestrian ideal, modern combat puts more emphasis on mobility, long-range missile attack and distancing from the target both physical and psychological. From this perspective, the infantry is just there to occupy terrain, deny it to the enemy, abuse local civilians and get ripped to pieces by devastating mobile firepower. Lethal drones vs. roving IED bombers serve as the latest, most relevant examples. 

In the final analysis, these quibbles are secondary to the Learner intention of peace. From playground to parade ground and from kindergarten to kindermord (baby murder), our institutions subtly lure us into the meat grinder.

Even though we may have heard a lot about the warrior king Shaka Zulu, another African leader demands our attention. Weapon mentors have ignored him while they’ve flooded the collective memory with books, movies and television programs about the warrior psychopath.

Moshoeshoe (Moshesh, Mosheshwe or Mshweshwe – pronounced moh-shwayshway) was born a prince of the Basotho in 1786. He became an angry and impatient young man. So his father sent him to study under Mohlomi, a famous chieftain who taught him dignity, self-restraint, patience and leadership. Moshoeshoe learned the value of hard work; that powerless people deserve justice, and the poor, compassion. These lessons served him well under the most trying circumstances an able ruler would face.

After a great drought brought on the mfécane or lifaquane, (crushing dispersal, like ours soon to come thanks to global warming), Moshoeshoe withdrew with his people to the natural mountain fortress of Buta-Buthe. When Tlokoa tribesmen invaded his territory in overwhelming numbers, he withdrew with a few survivors to Thaba Bosiu or Bosigo (the Mountain of the Night) from which he would never be dislodged.

His warriors captured two Tlokoa cannibals who had killed and eaten his grandfather when he fell behind during the retreat. Moshoeshoe forgave them and granted them farmland so they could give up cannibalism. He said he had to revere the resting place of his grandfather.

Thanks to a series of brilliant military campaigns and diplomatic coups, he defeated a succession of aggressors against his people. He threw back triumphant forces of the Tlokoa, the Nguni, the Ndebele Zulu (after whose defeated troops he sent cattle and rations, wishing them peace —never again would they attack him), Voortrekkers and British Regulars. Any army too powerful for him to defeat, he would negotiate its deflection against another group. He was a better general than his enemies and a better negotiator than his neighbors. All his wars were defensive. What he held onto, he would never let go without a hard fight. He always sought peace. 

He welcomed refugees from the four corners of southern Africa and multiplied his few thousand survivors twenty-fold. He forged the Basotho nation and held it together through every adversity, despite its traumatized and scattered constituents. His was perhaps the only place in South Africa where a homeless refugee and his family could find welcome, security and justice. In return they offered him their desperate loyalty and valor. No other native district thereabouts stood up so well against the tests of time and man. 

In 1838, wandering priests arrived from the Evangelical Missionary Society of Paris. He welcomed them, encouraged them to create an alphabet for his language and set up schools for his people’s children; then he had them negotiate with Queen Victoria on his behalf. Though he could quote Bible verse, he never became a practicing Christian. 

When the Voortrekkers finally defeated him in 1868, he put his nation under British protection. As was their habit, they stole his best land. Eventually, the truncated remainder became the modern state of Lesotho. Moshoeshoe died in 1870.

There are admirable warriors and there are the others. Learner does not suggest we despise them, rather that we change the heart of those who delude themselves that anything less than permanent peace is victory. Victory means permanent peace: anything less is of no more value than a train wreck. It insults the sacred memory of those whose life was sacrificed. Without permanent peace, there can be no victory; without victory, no honor. Without honor, there should never have been any fighting to begin with, except for the most extreme case of self-defense.

Moshoeshoe understood this fully — as the rest of us must. And, whenever possible, he accepted the Other, the unknown stranger, and bid them welcome.

It’s up to us to imitate him.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- ALIENS & CAVEMEN (2) -