WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- WORLD MILITIA (III) -
Prismatic aggressors will call down the following outcomes on themselves.
· Selective and simultaneous destruction by long-range bombardment of local ordnance depots, armed concentrations, armaments factories and military headquarters.
· Grim enforcement of economic blockade. These have proven to be surprisingly effective against such diverse societies as apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa, Vietnam, the breakaway Soviet Republics, Nicaragua, Serbia, Cuba and Iran.
· The flip side to this blockade would be a Marshall Plan executed to satisfy local peace requirements and carefully advertised during its negotiation and implementation. This alternative will be more rewarding than a comparable blockade and less costly in the long run. A psychopathic tyrant could starve his host proletariat under global blockade and seem to draw political strength from so doing (as did Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Learners will flood target countries with survival necessities and economic support but denying them military supplies. It is a question of becoming sharp enough to discriminate between the requirements of peace and those of weapons: Learner is all about that razor-sharpness.
· Active resistance by World Court-armed, supplied and trained local militias ‒ serving as guerrillas, if necessary ‒ supported by the World Court’s Special Forces, heavy weapon and aerial ground attack units. The World Court will take the place of the friendly adjacent countries mentioned earlier. In the long run, local bandits will find this combination overwhelming. For example, the Kosovo Liberation Army could have been outfitted with simple radio/infrared target designators to guide NATO aircraft on their bomb runs and selectively destroy Serbian gun positions and armored vehicles hiding in local housing. This equipment could be turned off the moment NATO stopped its attack sorties or replaced its transmitters and their control frequencies. If this equipment were captured or compromised, it would serve as magnets for bombs aimed at their abusers. American Special Forces used the same principle when they attacked the Taliban. A few of their elite soldiers operated as coordinators of attack aircraft in conjunction with regional anti-Taliban troops behind a curtain of aerial bombs.
· A consistent policy of political moderation, peacemaking (faire paix? fair play?) and renewed negotiations for peace.
· I must repeat this mandatory topic of passion for all those eventually responsible. ALWAYS AND AT ALL COSTS, PEACE!
· Relentless pursuit of prismatic leaders with criminal bounties and merciless prosecution for their crimes against humanity.
· Finally, negative world opinion focused on the practice of human rights activism by unarmed peace martyrs and fearless media reportage of their fate.
Conventional politicians find these alternatives unprofitable. Under the realpolitik restrictions of weapon mentality, they belittle peace measures already proved to work. They’ve done nothing to block massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia and Syria ; instead, they have adopted anti-foreigner propaganda, police riots and theatrical military adventures only profitable for weapon corporations, to divert their constituents’ attention from policy failures both at home and abroad.
In The Utility of War: the Art of War in the Modern World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, General Rupert Smith compares wars of the past, which he calls industrial war, with those in the present, he calls “war among the people.”
During industrial war, well defined nation-states “game” each other like high-stakes poker players, anteing up manpower and industrial capacity for a climax confrontation that ends conveniently in total defeat for one side and total victory for the other. According to him, this type of historical warfare ended with the advent of weapons of mass destruction. However, the developed nations (actually, every nation-state on WeaponWorld, whether “developed,” “developing” or “failed”) continue to train, organize and equip themselves for industrial war. That is what governments do; everything else is at best a secondary consideration.
The Utility asserts that modern nations must learn to fight a new kind of war: one where minorities live among the people while holding on to politics that differ from those of developed nations, and in which both sides fight “to capture the will of the people.”
The common currency of this new kind of war is the aimed bullet for as long as it takes to re-establish order under the law; followed by gathered evidentiary information that leads to prosecution and sentencing in order to re-establish justice once and for all.
Unlike industrial war, the people are not the enemy, even though the enemy live among the people; the presumed goal is to re-establish justice instead of defeating an entire people and its army; and the common currency is information instead of firepower.
The outcomes achieved by war among the people may include amelioration, containment, deterrence-or-coercion, and destruction, in ascending order of applied force and descending likelihood of success. The timeframe is indefinite and perhaps endless instead of ASAP. Finally, the military alternative is only one among many means to achieve the desired strategic goal, and not the primary one compared to political, diplomatic, legal and economic actions (one’s own, one’s allies’ and those of the people). There are too many good ideas in this book to review all of them here. Recommended reading.
In 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s Doctrine outlined six conditions the U.S. would have to fulfill in order to avoid another quagmire like the Vietnam War.
1. It should be of vital national interest to the United States and its allies.
2. Intervention must occur wholeheartedly, with the clear intention of winning.
3. There must be clearly defined political and military objectives.
4. The relationship between the objectives and the forces must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
5. There must be a reasonable assurance that the American people and Congress will support the intervention.
6. Commitment of U.S. forces should be the last resort.
General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War (1991), added one last set of conditions.
7. Should the U.S. intervene, the operation should be short, occasion few casualties to U.S. forces, and the force used must be decisive and overwhelming.
General Smith demonstrates that these pre-conditions cannot be dealt with during War of the People, as opposed to Industrial War, the major reason being that most of them cannot be answered reliably before such an operation is undertaken. Later on in his book (page 392), he lists a number of questions that rational leaders of a developed nation need to answer before they can engage in a new military adventure.
“Whom are we opposed to? What is the outcome they desire? What future do they threaten? How is this different from our desired outcome?
“Are we seeking order or justice? On a scale between them, where is our outcome? If we are seeking justice, whom is it for?
“Who are we going to deal with, their present leaders or do we want others in power? If so, who are they? Are we changing the present leadership entirely? If not, who stays?
“Whose law are we using; theirs or ours? If ours; do we want their law to change?
“Who is administering the state; them or us?
“Do we know the outcome we want in sufficient detail that we can set objectives to be achieved? If not, the most we can achieve is a situation likely to be conductive to an outcome we will approve of. Can we define this “condition” so that we can set objectives to be achieved? If not; the most we can do is to ameliorate and contain, whilst we find the information to answer the foregoing questions.
“At what level (Strategic, Theater or Tactical) can we in theory achieve objectives directly by force of arms? Should we do this? Can we do this? Will we do this? When do we do this?
“If not, what are we prepared to threaten and promise in order to achieve the objectives we have defined? What does the opponent most value that we can threaten? What does he want most? (Remembering always that threats are expensive when they fail and bribes are expensive when they succeed.) When do we do this?
Learner doggedly challenges the parenthetical conclusion above. When it comes to profits for the rich and the costs for the poor, pacifying bribes are almost always cheaper than the robotic expenses of war, like those against Vietnam.
How would Ho Chi Minh have reacted if we had offered him a hundredth of the fortune we spent to massacre his people, as an outright gift with no strings attached? As opposed to President Johnson’s opening peace proposal of World Bank type infrastructure loans to dam the Mekong, that would have left Vietnam with a staggering, national debt enslaving it to the West? “Or we will kill millions of you and dump Agent Orange all over your great rice basket of Asia. “
Barbarians unfit to rule…
“How do we show the threat is credible, that we will carry it out, that we will succeed even if we have to escalate to do so? Are all other courses of action open to us perceived as being less attractive to us than carrying out our threat?
“How do we show the opponent’s threats are insufficient and that we will reject their alternative outcome?
“How do we ensure our promises are credible in the eyes of the opponent and the people?
“How do we ensure the opponent and the people can be trusted?”
Above and beyond those questions posed by General Smith, honest ones that a global leadership must ask include:
“Is the military chaos of WeaponWorld – as practiced by paramilitary nation-states, corporations and insurgencies in the developed and underdeveloped world alike – justifiable on moral, tactical or strategic grounds? Wouldn’t PeaceWorld offer a better setting in which to defend the high ideals implied in the questions above? In the meantime, aren’t we the moral equivalents of those terrorists, merely hoodlums better financed and organized, unable to defeat them in the long run since we reject the genuine morality, avowable propaganda and honest organization offered by PeaceWorld? Are we willing to achieve victory for keeps instead of maintaining our customary state of perpetual war by discovering, manufacturing and engaging ever more enemies?”
These days, many people conspire to get weapon martyrs to die eagerly, provided they seriously hurt Others marked for contempt. What we really need is an army of peace martyrs carefully trained and prepared to die as Witnesses for Peace — so that no one else need do so to no purpose and against their will.
Everyone should be taught to handle fire harms (arms) safely. The trick would be to arm everyone equally and shield them with equally good justice. Universal fire harm training will reduce gun accidents and deadly crime, assuming Israel and Switzerland are good examples.
Unfortunately, Israel can no longer consider itself a valid participant in these activities. It arms its majority against a select, prey minority. Israel, despite its genius (and that of its crushed Palestinian minority, just as evident), has failed so far to manage this feat. Jerusalem would be a good place to try out this PeaceWorld project.
Lethal crime will become much less tempting and frequent. After all, any victim or witness could rally an armed platoon from the nearest city block. Armed crime would be suicide. Even suicidal terrorists would have a much harder time, once their community devoted itself to peace instead of tolerating their mayhem.
After witnessing what military munitions do to flesh, most people lose their appetite, much less interest in the glories of ideological and inter-ethnic conflict. Young Learners will pay scheduled visits to city emergency rooms, military hospitals, morgues and centers of detention. Entertainment media will glorify peacemakers and Satyagraha. Without exception, they will portray the violence-prone as losers guaranteed, sooner or later, to turn themselves into rotting corpses or walking-dead convicts.
As a rule, local police won’t carry deadly weapons. If they need to do so, that will be a public confession of failure, admission that they had lost control of the local situation. The World Court would check this out immediately and intervene right away to restore peace there.
In societies where involuntary poverty is unacceptable, where personal security is taken for granted and the police and the public are customary allies, criminality will become the isolated act of sick and desperate individuals who can’t conceal their worst activities profitably for very long. Less criminal profit, less crime.
If an outrageous crime requires massed guns to stop, nearby militias can be deputized.
Sometime in the future, most crime interventions will depend on social ostracism and a carefully fostered sense of guilt. Prison terms and other primitive forms of physical punishment will become extraordinary measures of compulsion, confessions of public failure on the part of local administrations and their host population. Potential offenders will be identified and treated long before they commit serious infractions. If necessary, the worst offenders will suffer house arrest under chemically induced agoraphobic compulsion, or else get signed up for the Foreign Legion.
Goaded on by weapon mentality, we’ve turned our back on the fact that criminality is as much the fault of the surrounding community as of the offender. This idea should be emphasized to prevent crime beforehand, not to shield recidivists following their most recent crime.
Police intelligence units will be tolerated under strict World Court supervision, but just barely. Anti-constitutional police meddling will trigger World Court intervention.
The World Court’s intelligence system will consist of local populations, their telephones and a 1-800-MY-RIGHTS telephone number straight to the phone bank of World Court investigators.
According to dominant opinion-spinners, expensive new bureaucracies will have to be created to forecast and preempt war. These ridiculous preparations are doomed to fail. Instead, human rights complaints will receive swift and thorough investigation, provided they exceed a statistical norm of crank calls. Secret police will not be called for, beyond a nominal complement of plain-clothed Continental and World Court investigators dispatched in proportion to the volume of incoming complaints or in the absence of a statistically predictable number of them.
Local militias will protect them, if possible; World Court troops, if not. They will confirm local warnings, protect whistle blowers and arrest weapon criminals. If necessary, they will serve as sacrificial canaries in a coalmine. Communities where harm befalls them will pay for it dearly!
Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted a frightening future in War and Anti-War, the military appendix of their multi-volume treatise called Future Shock. According to them, societies evolve toward a Third Wave of political control based on economies of knowledge, once they’ve graduated from the First Wave: sustenance agriculture, and the Second: industrial development. Talk about economizing knowledge! What a fitting portrayal of today’s force-feeding of trivia and contempt for wisdom!
The Tofflers’ fondness for the Chinese School of Law betrays the weapon content of their message. They foresee a grim future during which decaying national and ethnic elites (Learner’sPrisms) will adhere fanatically to their favorite Wave of control to restore ancient patterns of dominance by force. The more reactionary and absolute their expectations, the more sophisticated their strokes of terror.
Unfamiliar with the weapon/peace antinomy (like everyone else), the Tofflers discount the self-discipline and decentralized restraint Learner will expect from almost everyone. Terrorists cannot thrive once their host population shuns them.
The Tofflers are correct in predicting military disaster if the status quo of weapons mentality continues to dominate our spirit. Indeed, they are over-optimistic in their hope it can be controlled. However, their prediction is wrong if peace mentality assumes its rightful place. Well-treated and expecting such treatment by long tradition, locals will check their hotheads and limit their activities to spectacular theatrics only nominally lethal.
There have been significant prior and sub-Waves in addition to the Tofflers’ three; for example, peaceful, prehistoric, matrilineal societies. Each new wave only succeeds insofar it incorporates and complements the best aspects of prior ones. For example, Monarchy, weapon culture's tyrannical, corporate predecessor, is almost identical to our corporate national-capitalism. Long live King Cola!
Each new wave replaced its predecessors (except the peaceful ones destroyed militarily) once they began to grow uncontrollably and annihilate the better aspects of prior ones. The most recent wave (corporate weapon technology) is failing completely by annihilating productive aspects of former ones. A new one, so far unforeseen, is going to take its place.
One of the best suggestions in War and Anti-War is a million-dollar reward for whistle blowers who denounce hoarders of weapons of mass destruction. Learner intelligence Networks will work up that idea. The Tofflers consider essential and inevitable new knowledge infrastructures that resemble info politics suggested in Learner.
A good place to start would be organizing underprivileged youth as local police auxiliaries and making them jointly responsible to uphold neighborhood peace. Require of them that they disarm and submit to police discipline. Pay them a wage and cadre their units with police instructors. Provide job training and character references for yearly graduates who seek honest work elsewhere, and guaranteed trouble for youths who reject better alternatives. Young psychopaths will be picked out for lifelong supervision and medical treatment.
By definition, community policing is a labor-intensive job ; many Constables will walk a beat in their own, small neighborhood. Citizens and police must recognize each other as cooperative mutualists. Local adolescents could carry out neighborhood surveillance and leave serious law enforcement to clued-in adult police. We’re not talking about children betraying their honest parents to some tyrannical government: conscientious police instruction will reject that kind of political obscenity.
Small teams of U.S. Army Green Berets trained thousands of foreign soldiers in a few months. We could apply their teaching methods to this new form of community policing.
Reestablish age-set societies within civilian communities. Youths could graduate through tiers of initiation ceremonies into socially responsible, age-peer hierarchies of augmented privilege and obligation. Most youths should find more value in these groups and their social approval (passion) than in any contemplated criminality. Their appeal should become so irresistible that even the toughest criminals retained some emotional attachment to them.
Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like our scout and youth sports organizations, but cooperative and focused on peace in general instead of competitive in preparation for war.
Of course, this new cultural arrangement will require that recreational drugs be legalized for adults in private settings. The only practical consequences of this prohibition – each detrimental to public peace – have been to alienate the police from the community it was intended to serve and increase the count and qualifications of potential combatants. Those weapon priorities must annulled.
A kid got shot dead off his bicycle a block from my home. Another got his skull bashed in, in all innocence, merely for riding his sister’s pink bicycle. Many more suffered anonymously on my beat. Yet another threatened me with a pistol during an evening walk home. Despite my fine words, he is in prison for his pains or has gone free since; I didn’t pay enough attention. I could not make myself attend his trial. I could not get him a peace trial. The grim blend of post-traumatic depression and current jurisprudence forbad it.
Good American soldiers have died for nothing for decades in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as countless local innocents. Thousands were massacred in the Twin Towers and millions more across the planet. All those losses have left me numb — miserable coward that I am. It seemed to me that each of them was my responsibility and I should have figured out how to save them. I failed, all of us failed to save them. Every one of us is 100% responsible.
Stop claiming otherwise.
The saddest aspect of the current situation is that it will get worse as basic resources run low. As long as we maintain old routines, our predicament will worsen along with prevailing levels of institutionalized violence, until someone wearing a cheap badge crashes through our front door and ships us off to a death camp.
There is no easy way to wake up from this WeaponWorld nightmare: only depraved collaboration, armed resistance or helpless victimization — each of which can only worsen the outcome. The hard way would be to establish PeaceWorld.
Where is the enthusiasm for PeaceWorld that should inspire every good soul? How much longer, God of Armies (as God is called in the Old Testament; “Lord of Hosts” is King James la-dee-da), until Learner inspires an attentive handful at first and then the landslide of their followers?
What are we waiting for? It would take the orthodox media three months of active dissemination for Learner doctrines to become household terms across the planet. Why wait? How many more tragedies do we need to witness, in addition to all those already come to pass, to confirm we lack any better option?
Rather than submit to WeaponWorld like cattle to the slaughter, I call on everyone to join PeaceWorld.
…
COMMENT? markmulligan@comcast.net