This is Human Supremacism

SUBHEAD: The belief in Human Supremacy is morally indefensible and destroys our planet.

By Derrick Jensen on 26 August 2016 for AlterNet.org  -
(http://www.alternet.org/books/conservative-belief-human-supremacy-destroying-our-planet)


Image above: Researcher Walter Tschinkel uses molten metal to make casts of intricate harvester ant nests. And it was not just once. It was many times. From (https://www.sciencenews.org/article/harvester-ants-are-restless-enigmatic-architects).

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen (Seven Stories Press, 2016)

"The modern conservative [and, I would say, the human supremacist] is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." —John Kenneth Galbraith

I’m sitting by a pond, in sunlight that has the slant and color of early fall. Wind blows through the tops of second-growth redwood, cedar, fir, alder, willow. Breezes make their way down to sedges, rushes, grasses, who nod their heads this way and that. Spider silk glistens. A dragonfly floats a few inches above the water, then suddenly climbs to perch atop a rush.

A family of jays talks among themselves.

I smell the unmistakable, slightly sharp scent of redwood duff, and then smell also the equally unmistakable and also slightly sharp, though entirely different, smell of my own animal body.
A small songbird, I don’t know who, hops on two legs just above the waterline. She stops, cocks her head, then pecks at the ground.

Movement catches my eye, and I see a twig of redwood needles fall gently to the ground. It helped the tree. Now it will help the soil.

Someday I am going to die. Someday so are you. Someday both you and I will feed—even more than we do now, through our sloughed skin, through our excretions, through other means—those communities who now feed us.

And right now, amidst all this beauty, all this life, all these others—sedge, willow, dragonfly, redwood, spider, soil, water, sky, wind, clouds—it seems not only ungenerous, but ungrateful to begrudge the present and future gift of my own life to these others without whom neither I nor this place would be who we are, without whom neither I nor this place would even be.

Likewise, in this most beautiful place on Earth—and you do know, don’t you, that each wild and living place on Earth is the most beautiful place on Earth—I can never understand how members of the dominant culture could destroy life on this planet. I can never understand how they could destroy even one place.

---

Last year someone from Nature [sic] online journal interviewed me by phone. I include the sic because the journal has far more to do with promoting human supremacism—the belief that humans are separate from and superior to everyone else on the planet—than it has to do with the real world.

Here is one of the interviewer’s “questions”:

“Surely nature can only be appreciated by humans. If nature were to cease to exist, nature itself would not notice, as it is not conscious (at least in the case of most animals and plants, with the possible exception of the great apes and cetaceans) and, other than through life’s drive for homeostasis, is indifferent to its own existence. Nature thus only achieves worth through our consciously valuing it.”

At the precise moment he said this to me, I was watching through my window a mother bear lying on her back in the tall grass, her two children playing on her belly, the three of them clearly enjoying each other and the grass and the sunshine. I responded, “How dare you say these others do not appreciate life!” He insisted they don’t.

I asked him if he knew any bears personally. He thought the question absurd.

This is why the world is being murdered.

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Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture. A central unquestioned belief of this culture is that humans are superior to and separate from everyone else. Human supremacism is part of the foundation of much of this culture’s religion, science, economics, philosophy, art, epistemology, and so on.

Human supremacism is killing the planet. Human supremacists—at this point, almost everyone in this culture—have shown time and again that the maintenance of their belief in their own superiority, and the entitlement that springs from this belief, are more important to them than the well-being or existences of everyone else.

Indeed, they’ve shown that the maintenance of this self-perception and entitlement are more important than the continuation of life on the planet.

Until this supremacism is questioned and dismantled, the self-perceived entitlement that flows from this supremacism guarantees that every attempt to stop this culture from killing the planet will fail, in great measure because these attempts will be informed and limited by this supremacism, and thus will at best be ways to slightly mitigate harm, with the primary point being to make certain to never in any way question or otherwise endanger the supremacism or entitlement.

In short, people protect what’s important to them, and human supremacists have shown time and again that their sense of superiority and the tangible benefits they receive because of their refusal to perceive others as anything other than inferiors or resources to be exploited is more important to them than not destroying the capacity of this planet to support life, including, ironically, their own.

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Especially because human supremacism is killing the planet, but also on its own terms, human supremacism is morally indefensible. It is also intellectually indefensible. Neither of which seems to stop a lot of people from trying to defend it.

The first line of defense of human supremacism is no defense at all, literally. This is true for most forms of supremacism, as unquestioned assumptions form the most common base for any form of bigotry: Of course humans (men, whites, the civilized) are superior, why do you ask?

Or more precisely: How could you possibly ask? Or even more precisely: What the hell are you talking about, you crazy person? Or more precisely yet, an awkward silence while everyone politely forgets you said anything at all.

Think about it: if you were on a bus or in a shopping mall or in a church or in the halls of Congress, and you asked the people around you if they think humans are more intelligent than or are otherwise superior to cows or willows or rivers or mushrooms or stones (“stupid as a box of rocks”), what do you think people would answer?

If you said to them that trees told you they don’t want to be cut down and made into 2x4s, what would happen to your credibility?

Contrast that with the credibility given to those who state publicly that you can have infinite economic (or human population) growth on a finite planet, or who argue that the world consists of resources to be exploited.

If you said to people in this culture that oceans don’t want to be murdered, would these humans listen? If you said that prairie dogs are in no way inferior to (or less intelligent than) humans, and you said this specifically to those humans who have passed laws requiring landowners to kill prairie dogs, would they be more likely to laugh at you or agree with you?

Or do you think they’d be more likely to get mad at you? And just think how mad they’d get if you told them that land doesn’t want to be owned (most especially by them). If you told them there was a choice between electricity from dams and the continued existence of salmon, lampreys, sturgeon, and mussels, which would they choose?

 Why? What are they already choosing?

---

This is too abstract. Here is human supremacism. Right now in Africa, humans are placing cyanide wastes from gold mines on salt licks and in ponds. This cyanide poisons all who come there, from elephants to lions to hyenas to the vultures who eat the dead. The humans do this in part to dump the mine wastes, but mainly so they can sell the ivory from the murdered elephants.

Right now a human is wrapping endangered ploughshares tortoises in cellophane and cramming them into roller bags to try to smuggle them out of Madagascar and into Asia for the pet trade. There are fewer than 400 of these tortoises left in the wild.

Right now in China, humans keep bears in tiny cages, iron vests around the bears’ abdomens to facilitate the extraction of bile from the bears’ gall bladders. The bears are painfully “milked” daily. The vests also serve to keep the bears from killing themselves by punching themselves in the chest.

Right now there are fewer than 500 Amani flatwing damselflies left in the world. They live along one stream in Tanzania. The rest of their home has been destroyed by human agriculture.

This year has seen a complete collapse of monarch butterfly populations in the United States and Canada. Their homes have been destroyed by agriculture.

Right now humans are plowing under and poisoning prairies. Right now humans are clearcutting forests. Right now humans are erecting mega-dams. Right now because of dams, 25 percent of all rivers no longer reach the ocean.

And most humans couldn’t care less.

Right now the University of Michigan Wolverines football team is hosting the Minnesota Golden Gophers. More than 100,000 humans are attending this football game. More than 100,000 humans have attended every Michigan home football game since 1975. There used to be real wolverines in Michigan.

One was sighted there in 2004, the first time in 200 years. That wolverine died in 2010.
More people in Michigan—“The Wolverine State”—care about the Michigan Wolverines football team than care about real wolverines.

This is human supremacism.

---

 I just got a note from a friend who was visiting her son. She writes, “Yesterday morning when I emptied the compost bucket, the guy next door called out to ask if that was ‘garbage’ I was putting on the pile. I told him it was ‘compost.’ We went back and forth a couple of times.

Then he said, ‘We don’t want no [sic] animals around here. I saw a raccoon out there. There were never any animals around here before.’ What better statement of human supremacism?”

---

Recently, scientists discovered that some species of mice love to sing. They “fill the air with trills so high-pitched that most humans can’t even hear them.” If “the melody is sweet enough, at least to the ears of a female mouse, the vocalist soon finds himself with a companion.”

Mice, like songbirds, have to be taught how to sing. This is culture, passed from generation to generation. If they aren’t taught, they can’t sing.

So, what is the response by scientists to these mice, who love to sing, who teach each other how to sing, who sing for their lovers, who have been compared to “opera singers”?

Given what the ideology of human supremacism does to people who otherwise seem sane, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the scientists wanted to find out what would happen if they surgically deafened these mice.

And we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the mice could no longer sing their operas, their love songs. The deafened mice could no longer sing at all. Instead, they screamed.

And who could blame them? This is human supremacism.

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Or there’s this. Just yesterday I spoke with Con Slobodchikoff, who has been studying prairie dog language for more than thirty years. Through observing prairie dogs non-intrusively in the field, he has learned of the complexity of their language and social lives. But he has done so, he said, without the aid of grants.

Time and again he was told that if he wanted to receive money for his research—and if he wanted to do “real science” instead of “just” observing nature—he would have to capture some prairie dogs, deafen them, and then see how these social creatures with their complex auditory language and communal relationships responded to their loss of hearing. Of course he refused.

Of course he didn’t receive the grants.

This is human supremacism.

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And then today I got an email from a botanist friend who has worked for various federal agencies.

His work has included identifying previously unknown species of plants.

He said this work has not been supported by the agencies, because the existence of rare plants would interfere with their management plans, including the mass spraying of herbicides. His discoveries have been made on his own time and on his own dime.

It’s a good thing science is value free, isn’t it?

I told him Slobodchikoff had said to me that the scientific establishment makes it very difficult for people to manifest their love of the world. Slobodchikoff said this as someone who loves the earth very much.

My botanist friend agreed. “Science makes it very hard to love the world. Most scientists want the world to fit nice, clear, linear equations, and anything that doesn’t fit is ignored, unless you can get a publication out of it. Love isn’t a concept that would even come to mind concerning the natural world. The natural world is just a means to an end.

A thing to be dissected, so they can get tenure. I was talking to a local botany professor, about how geology can drive speciation/change, and he was actually surprised to consider anything outside of genetic mechanisms. I was surprised at his surprise: his view just seemed so limited.

A plant to him is an isolated, discrete entity, rather than the expression of the complex interactions and relationships between all the entities/factors in the environment going back 3.5 billion years.”

---

Or there’s this. I just saw a snuff video of scientists pouring molten aluminum into an anthill to reveal the shape of the tunnels. Then the scientists marveled at the beauty of the shape of the anthill they just massacred to the last ant.

This is human supremacism.

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Or there’s this. The air around the world has recently been declared to be as carcinogenic as secondhand smoke.

The leading cause of lung cancer is now industrial pollution.


This is human supremacism.
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US War Crime in Yemen

SUBHEAD: US bombs as well as targeting and aircraft used in destroying Yemen market.

By Staff on 6 April 2016 in Hawaiian News Now -
(http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/31664035/report-saudi-coalition-used-us-bomb-in-yemen-market-strike)


Image above: Crater from Saudi bombing on 3/15/16 of public market in Yemen using US ordenensce, aircraft and ground support. Still frame from video below by Human Rights Watch.).

A Saudi-led coalition battling Shiite rebels and their allies in Yemen used U.S.-supplied bombs in an airstrike last month on a market that killed at least 119 people, a human rights group said Thursday, further highlighting American involvement in the conflict.

The March 15 bombing targeting the northwestern town of Mastaba marked the second-deadliest airstrike of the year-long Saudi-helmed campaign - and the results were horrific. Survivors said the outdoor market, next to a shantytown inhabited largely by people who fled there from other battle zones, was obliterated by double strikes that came about 10 minutes apart, with mangled bodies thrown hundreds of yards away.

"I saw the sky raining ball of black fire," recalled a 30-year-old gas worker Omar Mallah, whose brother and several other relatives were killed.

Human Rights Watch said its investigators traveled to the town in Yemen's northwestern Hajja province, controlled by the Shiite rebels known as Houthis. There, the group said it found fragments of a 900-kilogram (2,000-pound) MK-84 bomb and a kind of satellite-guidance hardware known as a JDAM, which together are known as a GBU-31 bomb.

The group said the bomb, as well as its guidance equipment, was supplied by the U.S. Their finding matched an earlier report by British television channel ITV, which said its journalists found remnants of what likely was another MK-84 bomb and a different kind of satellite guiding system supplied by the United States.

"One of the deadliest strikes against civilians in Yemen's yearlong war involved U.S.-supplied weapons, illustrating tragically why countries should stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia," Priyanka Motaparthy, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "The U.S. and other coalition allies should send a clear message to Saudi Arabia that they want no part in unlawful killings of civilians."

Rights groups have repeatedly warned that U.S. and European weapons sold to Saudi Arabia could be used in strikes violating international law. Saudi Arabia and its allies launched their air campaign in March 2015 aiming to stop advances by the rebels, known as Houthis, who had driven the government out of the capital.

Since then, fighting between the rebels and Saudi-backed factions and airstrikes have killed at least 9,000 people, an estimated 3,000 of them civilians, according to the U.N., which says at least 60 percent of the civilian deaths come from strikes, which have often hit crowded areas including markets, hospitals, factories, schools and residential districts. Coalition officials dispute those figures.
The war has displaced 2.4 million people and caused widespread malnutrition.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military action in the Mideast, declined to comment on specifics about the Mastaba bombing, saying that the "selection and final vetting of targets in the campaign are made by the members of the Saudi-led coalition, not the United States."

"The U.S. is confident that the information that we relay and noncombat support we provide to Saudi Arabia and other coalition members is sound and provides them the best options for military success consistent with international norms and specifically mitigating the potential for civilian casualties," U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kyle Raines, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The U.S. is believed to offer the Saudi-led coalition satellite images and other intelligence about Yemen to guide its campaign.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, asked about the report during a visit to Bahrain, said, "I don't have any solid information, any documentation with respect to what weapon might have been used."
"Whatever weapons are being used, our preference is that all shooting stops," he said.

Saudi officials have said they were investigating the strike, though they previously insisted most of the casualties were Houthi combatants.

Coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Ahmed al-Asiri sent the AP a map via Whatsapp showing three red circles: One identified as a Houthi gathering position, a second as a small market adjacent to the Houthi position and a third as the large market. He said the airstrikes hit the small market next to Houthi gathering because this is where the militants were buying qat, a leaf chewed by Yemenis.

The Human Rights Watch report said there was a Houthi checkpoint about 250 yards (meters) from the market. It cited witnesses saying 10 Houthi fighters were among the dead in the market.

At Mastaba, relatives of several victims recounted to the AP a horrific scene, searching for days for body parts strewn over a wide area, over trees and rooftops, some as far as a sports center about a quarter-mile (half kilometer) away. Many were eventually buried in a nearby mass grave.

Mastaba was considered a safe haven for those fleeing towns closer to the Saudi border that were heavily pounded in airstrikes. Impoverished residents of a nearby slum of mud-brick houses often sent their children to work in the qat market. UNICEF said 22 children were among the dead in the strikes.

The timing of the airstrikes, at a time when people stock up on qat before lunchtime, contributed to the high death toll. Witnesses said that as rescuers came in to help victims of the first strike, the second strike hit.

Hassan Mafafi said it took him a whole day to locate one piece of remains from his 18-year-old son, Abdel-Rahman. He found his right leg, which he recognized from a scar marking an old axe wound. Choking back tears, he said he still couldn't bring himself to look at his son's picture tucked in his wallet.


Video above: Saudi Arabia-led coalition airstrikes using United States-supplied bombs killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children, in northwestern Yemen on March 15, 2016. From (https://youtu.be/aQS7sxaXVw4).

• Mansour al-Bakili said he collected 18 pieces he believed were body parts of his son, Mohammed. "We put them all in cloth and buried them," he said.
 Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper in Manama, Bahrain, contributed to this report.

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Nuclear Madness

SUBHEAD: From Nagasaki to Natanz, America's 70-year nuclear addiction and madness.

By Jon Letman on 9 August 2014 for Kauai Eclectic -
(http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2014/08/musings-nuclear-madness.html)


Image above: View of "Fat Man" atomic bomb detonation on Nakasaki, Japan on 9 August 1945. From (http://www.dangerouscreation.com/2012/06/was-this-when-the-u-s-lost-the-plot/).

Today is August 9, the day the U.S. dropped the word's first plutonium bomb on Nagasaki in 1945. That bomb killed an estimated 60-80,000 people, gravely injuring untold thousands more. You might expect that August 9 and the anniversary of Hiroshima three days earlier, would move people—especially Americans—to think seriously about our atomic past and future.

But people have a lot on their mind these days—Ebola, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, government surveillance, police brutality, climate change, the economy, summer vacation, school supplies for the kids and so on. Who's got time to think about nuclear weapons? Besides, aren't those a thing of the past? Some people seem to think so.

As I learned recently, analysts who spend much of their careers closely following the manufacturer and movement of nuclear weapons, are concerned that most people—at least in the United States—really don't give much thought to nuclear weapons.

Earlier this summer, over a period of about seven weeks, I spent a fair amount of time listening to defense analysts and reading about America's multi-billion dollar efforts to modernize some of our own nuclear weapons as research for this article published at Truthout.

I heard a range of opinions from one defense policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who insisted nuclear weapons are "fundamentally a force for good" to an anti-nuclear advocate and director of the Peace and Economic Security Program with the American Friends Service Committee who said bluntly, "These are weapons that should not exist,” calling them “the most fundamental violation of basic human rights.”

One of the most insightful and measured voices in the world of nuclear weapons analysis today is Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. I spoke with him on the phone for about one hour in May, asking him very specific questions about the B61-12, America's most common and now most expensive nuclear gravity bomb.

I found Kristensen by chance when I happened upon an article he had co-authored which was posted on the Twitter feed of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The piece was about the B61-12 and how it was being redesigned for the twelfth time to make it more accurate so that with "just" 50 kilotons (kt) it could, at least in theory, be used to "hold at risk" the same targets which today require a 350 kt yield bomb (by comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was estimated to have been around 15 kt and Nagasaki was destroyed by an estimated 20 kt bomb).

As Kristensen and I discussed the B61-12 and its $10 billion (and rising) price tag, I wondered what exactly this bomb was designed to destroy. Did its producers (primarily Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin and Boeing) see B61-12 as something that could destroy a major world capital or sprawling metropolitan area? Might it some day be used to threaten a city in Bush's "axis of evil?"

"These are not [targeted] against cities," Kristensen told me. "Generally speaking the U.S. military is not very happy about targeting cities with weapons. It's just so controversial," he said.

Besides, Kristensen added, nuking a major population center is "kind of pointless." Why would you want to fry millions of civilians? The real targets of these bombs are key military and political leadership and critical infrastructure, command and control facilities or a weapons lab and such.

But Kristensen pointed out that there is always the chance that such targets could be in or close to a city or other heavily populated area. After all, aren't most leaders based in cities—Tehran, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Washington, London, Paris...? So even if the U.S. wanted to take out a Iran's Natanz Enrichment Complex for example, it would still be bombing a facility less than 20 miles from a city of 12,000 with Iran's first and third largest cities, Tehran and Isfahan (combined population 9.3 million) less than 200 miles away.

Even a low-yield nuclear bomb (Kristensen explained that "low-yield" refers to a bomb 10 kt or less) would almost certainly have grave environmental, social and psychological consequences for people downwind of any nuclear detonation.

Looking back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can see that from the beginning of the nuclear age, the first targets were (at least by official accounts) primarily military in nature. Both Japanese cities (in fact, a third site called Kokura was intended to be bombed after Hiroshima and only spared when bad weather forced the U.S. to destroy its backup city Nagasaki) experienced unimaginable suffering as a result of the atomic bombings.

Despite this and all we've learned about the effects of radiation over the last seven decades, America and other nuclear nations continue to build newer, more accurate, more "useable" bombs. The U.S. alone is forecast to spend as much as $1 trillion on nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.

This pursuit is not only maddening, it's also sheer madness. And quibbling over a few billion dollars or a few extra kilotons is meaningless if you live in a society that is being robbed of real security (universal healthcare and education, a well-funded public infrastructure and robust environment and climate protection) when you and your children are perpetually in the shadow of a country with an insatiable appetite for the bomb.

To learn more about America's nuclear weapons past and present check out this FAQ page from the American Friends Service Committee

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Emotional Callousness

SUBHEAD:It's a self-Inflicted injury. Without feeling, there is neither information nor motivation.  

By Clifford Dean Scholz on 4 May 2011 in Green Hand Initiative - (http://greenhandinitiative.blogspot.com/2011/05/self-inflicted-injury-of-emotional.html)

 
Image above: Deputy Director of IMF (left) passing the homeless. From (http://www.thejournal.ie/imf-head-passes-three-homeless-on-way-to-bailout-talks-2010-11/).
 
I’m drinking a cup of coffee right now, having boiled the water with natural gas. I’m not exactly sure where the fuel I used comes from, but my guess is that natural gas from various sources gets marketed and distributed together. Therefore as I enjoy my coffee this morning, people in shale gas states now may have combustible household tap water and carcinogenic bathroom showers as a thank you for my convenience.

One of the hazards of environmental inquiry is to see horrors like this hiding behind pretty much everything I do and much of what I own, right down to the cotton socks on my feet. My question today is: How did I get to be so callous about it? And what should be done?

My most recent answer to the first part of this quandary is this:

• Step One is to see that I was born into a culture in which emotional callousness is a fundamental coping strategy.
• Step Two is to notice that approaches to solving the basic problems of living, which would be unthinkable if we were not so callous, are then baked into successive generations of technology, social norms, and institutions.
• Step Three (and it’s a short one) is seeing that it’s nearly impossible for an individual to live in a culture thus designed without also becoming callous.
• Step Four puts the whole thing on wheels: as conditions get worse and nearly every aspect of our culture holds in its shadow some kind of hell, the motivators are in place for yet more callousness leading to yet greater violations of sensibility in a self-reinforcing feedback loo

So that explains a lot about how we got where we are and why it’s so difficult to change: we’re living a callous morality, and we’re doing it on a global scale. Callous corporate ruthlessness has been part of the mix since these entities were first invented. Ships bearing cargoes of slaves, tea, and spices started the ball rolling, then coal, petroleum, tobacco and “unsafe-at-any-speed” car companies came to rule; when talking about profits before people, it’s nothing new. Callous government has been with us even longer than callous corporations. Consequently, as these entities have come to dominate our lives, we have in response become callous as well. What’s also becoming apparent is that there are consequences to this trend, and that they are serious ones.

“It’s the law of the jungle! It’s a matter of survival!” I hear.

Yes, this is true. Cultures that are ruthlessly efficient in extracting resources and developing weapons have overrun and exterminated all others.

And now, I would argue, that game has played out. The idea that power naturally accrues to those who are most ruthless and myopic in the pursuit of their own short term gain, and that this is the best way to run human society, is about to hit a wall.

In the long run, callousness and consciousness do not support one another. Although a certain toughness is required of everyone to meet the rigors of life, the tolerance for and even idealization of loss of feeling is not compatible with any sustainable form of human intelligence, since loss of feeling is a kind of loss of consciousness. Because of this, callousness and power are also ultimately at odds with one another.

The emotional callousness currently endemic on the global corporate and political scene, as well as in our consumer culture, works a bit like leprosy. Contrary to popular belief, leprosy does not cause limbs to fall off. What happens is that the disease attacks the nerves, resulting in a loss of feeling. Without the conscious feedback loop of feeling and physical sensation, nearly constant unintentional self-inflicted injuries result. Chronic infection and continuous scarring further the process, until disfigurement and deformity occur.

I would argue that emotional callousness does pretty much the same thing, and although the inner disfigurement is more easily hidden, at least among others who are similarly afflicted and who thus have difficulty feeling what’s going on, the consequences of it are visible everywhere. I believe we are fooling ourselves in the often unexamined belief that loss of the feeling sense and the inner connection to reality it can provide would have any better practical outcomes for effective action in the world than loss of physical sensation does for the human body.

Of course, an unfeeling approach seems to work so well at first. Then again, so perhaps does heroin. However, the complications that loss of feelings so efficiently eliminates are, in fact, information. Feelings are an irreplaceable mechanism for inner guidance and course correction. To the extent that we allow ourselves to become callous, we lose the holistic perspective feelings would otherwise provide. So, while emotional callousness can be compared to a kind of numbness, it also results in a kind of blindness. Either way, depending on the degree of the emotional impairment, nearly constant unintentional self-inflicted injuries result.

If my supposition is correct, it seems likely that the erosion and deformity of the emotional potential of humanity would generate other self-reinforcing feedback loops. On an individual level, disfiguring inner pain often results in further retraction from the feeling sense that would reveal its true nature and extent. The typical judgment is that it is simply too much. On aggregate, social pressures mount not to feel much, since one person’s emotions are likely to trigger and thus reveal another’s. Fortunately, we have the distractions, drugs, and prisons to handle it, or we wait until body systems fail under the stress and then treat the problem in the form of diseases. A rather reliable indicator of numbness is the level of stimulation required to generate a response. Here our culture seems to up the ante with every passing year.

News flash: Callousness, glamorized by many images in the media as strong and “macho,” is actually form of cowardice. To choose to be unfeeling on a consistent basis is to choose unconsciousness and death. When the people of a nation governed by democratic institutions embrace callousness as a coping strategy, that nation will be led by those who mirror this tendency. In time, and often rather quickly, leaders who embody callousness as an ideal will destroy their nations. The law of leprous self-inflicted injury will work systemically to debilitate the nation and its capacity to respond effectively to emerging conditions. This is exactly what we’re seeing. If we cannot change course at this moment, it is because not enough people can feel what’s going on. Without feeling, there is neither information nor motivation.

So, it’s not resource depletion, peak oil, climate change, rising population, corporatocracy or environmental devastation that will be the cause of our demise. Nor is the problem a political stalemate or the stranded costs of our investments in useless, outmoded or destructive technology. These are the not the problems, really: they are the symptoms.

Our callousness plays a causal role here, empowering all of these immanent threats to humanity. Change that and we start to change everything. And the beautiful thing is, we can change that. We can begin right now by bravely choosing a path of feeling, promoting values and institutions that are consistent with the development of feeling, loudly and clearly proclaiming ourselves to be people of feeling, and recognizing that being a person of feeling requires living a life of profound integrity.

In consequence, as I continue my inner work to open the doors to the deeply informative world of feeling, I must also for example begin to divest myself my participation in forms of agriculture that poison the land and abuse those who work it, and I must shift away from forms of transportation that ruin the air and pollute land and sea. The reason is, as I open those inner doorways, I feel my connection with all of these things. As incrementally as necessary and always compassionately, a person of feeling is required to connect precisely where the callous approach to living would disconnect. This is how we heal the planet by healing ourselves, and this is also the wellspring from which we will draw our strength, our inspiration, and our motivation to continue our work in the world.


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No Good Men Left Here

SUBHEAD: The Kill Team in Afghanistan is our Stryker Brigade, and the Kill Team at home is our own government.

By Christopher Ketcham on 10 September 2010 in Sign of the Times - 
(http://www.sott.net/articles/show/214973-No-Good-Men-Left-Here-The-Kill-Team-in-Afghanistan-and-the-Kill-Team-at-Home)

Image above: Andrew Holmes, Michael Wagnon, Jeremy Morlock and Adam Winfield are four of the five Stryker soldiers who face murder charges. From (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-afghan-civilians-fingers).

We already know enough from the Wikileaks Afghan archives to conclude that the news of the so-called "Kill Team" in Afghanistan - twelve US Army soldiers wantonly murdering and mutilating Afghan civilians - is no news at all. It is the norm of empire. It is the monstrous quotidian. Certainly there are many more instances like it that will never come to light. The soldier who first revealed the predations of the Kill Team, in a post to his parents on Facebook, writes of Afghanistan that:

"There are no good men left here. It eats away at my conscience every day."

Would that it ate at his fellow Americans. The Team's work, after all, is ours, paid for by us, abetted by our silence and our receivables, sanctioned by our standing up nowhere to be seen in opposition to a government that renders barbarism as statesmanship.

The work, to be sure, consisted of that for which the Team was well-trained, their minds at ease for the labor, the empire having asked of them only to oil their muscles and derange their hearts enough to put into action the deranged policy programmed by the higher-ups behind the laptops and in the lounge chairs. That all war creates victims of soldiers, victimized by their own governments, is forgotten, yet it should be the axiom of the age.

If the Kill Team is guilty of what we're told, then how judge them? The twelve soldiers now charged with premeditated murder, conspiracy, and "possessing human body parts" were said to have slaughtered innocent men, exploding their bodies with grenades or gunning them down, then laying into the dead flesh with knives.

They collected as keepsakes the fingerbones, leg bones, teeth; one soldier carried off an Afghan skull as thanks for the memories. They are guilty only of bringing the policy to its logical conclusion.

The policy is lunatic. It has no purpose beyond its own justification, which is that it must succeed because it is our policy. It cannot succeed because it entails the subjugation of a fractious tribal people who have shown to history again and again that they will not be subjugated.

The lunacy of the policy has its predictable effect on the troops who are meant to enforce it. Leaping on corpses to take scalps seems the natural course, the meaningful act in a meaningless affair, the occupation of Afghanistan finally making a twisted sense, freed of the hypocrisies of the political class.

We are there with guns to kill other human beings, the corpses as totems of victory - the people subjugated at last! - an accomplishment where there is no victory to be had. Godspeed, and more please. Or so we are to interpret the message from Congress, whose members, our very own representative Kill Team, year after year vote the appropriations for the continuing of the lunacy. The real Kill Team, of course, is in the White House, under the leadership of a Democratic president who, it's clear by now, is covertly serving out George W. Bush's third term in office.

The Kill Team is an executive body and its minions asserting the right of assassination of any person deemed fit, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drawing up "hit lists" that include American citizens, the Obama Administration expressly authorizing the CIA to bring down the death sentence on its select targets in the manner of a thunderbolt from the skies - no arrest, no charges, no trial, no defense, no prosecution, no process.

The same day the story of our centurions collecting fingerbones in Afghanistan hit the pages of the press, we might have looked to find the Ninth Circuit court, in its own way, educating the faithful soldiers in what is right and what is wrong.

The circuit had ruled that the Obama Administration shall be free to continue the torture of human beings under cover of law. The case, Binyam Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. - the defendant, a subsidiary of Boeing, contracts to provide the critical flight planning and logistical support for the CIA's "extraordinary renditions" - was brought by the ACLU on behalf of five victims of torture.

The victims, innocents all, attested that under the watch of the CIA and their other "extraordinary" handlers, they were beaten, their bones broken, their penises cut open, a "hot stinging liquid" poured into the open wounds, bottles pushed into their anuses, their arms shackled as they were hung from ceilings.

At least one of them was placed for a month in a room with open sewage. Barack Obama, following the lead of his predecessor, saw nothing wrong here, no need for truth or reconciliation or, god forbid, an apology, instead intervening in the case to prevent whatever "state secrets" the full hearing of the matter might reveal.

And the Ninth Circuit dutifully decided in favor of the secrets to be kept. The court's work is also, needless to say, part of the Kill Team. "There are no good men left here."

 • Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is writing a book about secession movements. Contact him at cketcham99@mindspring.com

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Globalized Free Fire Zone

SUBHEAD: The U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing by drones that respect no boundaries.

By Tom Engelhardt on 24 June 2010 in Tom's Dispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175265/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_perfect_american_weapon)


Image above: US military personnel using Predator drone to target pickup truck anywhere in the world. From (http://www.pauliddon.net/labels/predator%20drone.html).

Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.

In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.

Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country.

A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.
According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry.

Worse yet, these were capable -- so the CIA director and vice president claimed -- of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."

In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten.

Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.

In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly.

They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.


And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.

CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” -- a necessity for most combat award citations -- to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles.

“Valor to me is not risking your life," the colonel told the reporter. "Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor."

Smoking Drones
These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban.

Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably.

The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.
Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.”

Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”

Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war. “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing.”

Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”

But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming.
It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.

A Pilotless Military
If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.

It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times).

It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk... and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice -- the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away -- or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

The drones -- their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” -- could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution.

Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.

As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove.

With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.

 The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t.

 If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.

After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity.

As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.”

And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.
If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones.

We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?

Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.

The Globalization of Death
Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come.

There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilot-less planes.

Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.

Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won’t like it one bit.

When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

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